


Aftershocks

by trapper_john



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-10-30 20:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10883982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trapper_john/pseuds/trapper_john
Summary: After the death of his father, Hawkeye moves across the country to live with BJ in sunny California, hoping to find healing and comfort with his old friend. It seems like civilian life has changed him more than the war.





	1. Chapter 1

BJ sighed and shifted in his seat, wishing he’d brought Peg with him to the airport instead of Radar. She’d know what to say. He looked sideways at Radar, who was sitting hunched over in his seat, chin his hands, eyes half shut against the setting sun coming in through the floor to ceiling windows. The kid had seemed to age ten years in the time between his return to Iowa and his mother’s death. When he first showed up to the Hunnicutt house, almost broke from the cost of the trip to California, BJ almost wasn’t sure it was him. Erin hadn’t recognized him outright, but that could have been because she was very young the last time she had seen him. Life hadn’t been too good to Radar, and the loss of his family and the farm weighed heavy on his shoulders. He wondered how different Hawkeye would be when he got off the plane.

God bless Peg, he thought, and crooked an ankle over his knee. When he had asked about Hawkeye coming to stay with them, she hadn’t batted an eye. “We certainly have enough room,” she had said, slipping one hand into his. “Besides, we’ve seem to become a home for wayward soldiers anyway. One more won’t hurt.” He smiled at her and chose not to say how Hawkeye would feel about being called a soldier.

“Uh, BJ?” Radar stood up, tapping BJ’s shoulder. “It’s - it’s Hawkeye.”

He bolted upright, using all his considerable height to see over the crowd of people pouring into the airport from outside. “Where?” 

“He just got off the plane.”  
Sure enough, if he squinted he could just make out a tall figure silhouetted against the sun, standing at the top of the airstairs. “Come on, we’ll go outside.”   
By the time they fought their way through the crowd, they’d lost sight of Hawkeye. Buffeted by the people moving past, they struggled to hold their spot, and eventually made their way to the foot of the stairs leading into the plane.

BJ groaned. “Great, we lost him.”

“You should check the lost and found,” said a familiar voice behind them. BJ turned, a smile on his face, and felt it fall away immediately as soon as he caught sight of his friend. He was  _ thin,  _ thinner than usual, and his clothes were hanging off his bones like a coat on a hanger. His black hair, which was beginning to gray only five years ago, had turned completely silver. 

Radar broke the silence. “It’s good to see you again, sir.”

“You mean what’s left of me?” said Hawkeye, raising an eyebrow. “And knock off the sir, Radar, I left the war to get away from that specifically.” He grinned and clapped him on the shoulder, but the smile seemed forced. “Ah, I can’t stay mad at you, look at that face!”

Finally, BJ managed to speak. “It really is good to see you, Hawk. Everyone’s been anxiously waiting for you ever since we got your last telegram. Peg’s just thrilled to hear that you’re coming to stay with us.”

The graying man stared down at his shoes, then back up at him, looking past BJ’s shoulder for a moment. “Are you sure there’s room?”

The land Charles Winchester had helped them to buy was big enough for two houses, and although he wouldn’t tell Hawkeye, they’d already built an addition to the house for him to stay in. There was no question of room. “It’s a big house. Besides, if there’s not enough room, you can bunk with little BJ.” Hawkeye smiled at the mention of the newest addition to the Hunnicutt family.

“Make Radar! He can fit in the crib!”

“I sure didn’t miss that,” Radar mumbled. “Boy.”

“I can’t help it!” said Hawk, “I’m practically giddy. What’s for dinner?”

“Sandwiches if we don’t make it back in time,” said BJ, and they began the walk towards the airport. “If you’re hungry now, we can stop at a McDonald’s.”

“Nah, I had a - a bag of peanuts on the flight. Say, will the kids be up by the time we get back? I wanna meet them, you know, put a face to the name besides some crumpled wallet pictures.”

“I would have had those pictures laminated if I could have,” said BJ, patting his pocket where his wallet was. 

“They don’t go to bed until eight, so if we step on it we can make it about an hour before they go down,” said Radar, checking his watch. “That’s not accounting for traffic, though.”

“Thank you, madame concierge,” said Hawkeye, and to BJ, the awkward tension was now gone.

 

***

 

Gathered around the kitchen table, tearing into ham and cheese sandwiches and beer, the three army buddies stayed up late talking and playing cards. Hawkeye held up his silver beer can, squinting against the dying light at the brand.

“What happened to that old piss-and-water Fort Dix beer?” he asked, and at BJ’s confused look, tapped the silver can. “The orange can stuff.”

“Oh!” said BJ, and dropped his gaze back down to his sandwich. “They… they don’t sell it here.” He didn’t feel ready to tell Hawkeye about his manic purging of anything and everything that reminded him of Korea. The minute he had gotten back home, he’d gotten rid of every piece of clothing that was even close to khaki or army green, thrown out all his old military decorations. He’d even shaved off his moustache. 

“I can’t say I miss it,” he said, and nudged Radar, who was playing solitaire. “What happened to the Grape Nehi?”

“That stuff’s for kids,” said Radar, and Hawkeye laughed. “I’m serious. You can’t walk into a bar and order a grape soda. People look at you funny.” 

Hawkeye’s smile faded. “I thought you didn’t care about that kind of thing?”

“Yeah, well.” He sighed and gathered up his cards to shuffle them. “Too many knee high jokes.”

BJ was glad that Hawk had the good sense not to press him about it. A lot about Radar had changed, and not just his beverage choices. They’d all changed, but the cute kid from Iowa had changed the most. He was still essentially the same, but there was something about the way he talked, the way he carried himself, that was fundamentally different, and BJ was sure it wasn’t just his new job as a rookie cop.

“Speaking of knee high, sorry about the kids,” said BJ, and started gathering the crumb covered plates. “I couldn’t have guessed that Peg was putting them to bed early.”

“Don’t worry about it, Beej,” said Hawkeye, and took the plates out of his hands, bringing them to the sink himself. “They can meet their new favorite dad tomorrow.”

BJ laughed, throwing him a sarcastic smile. “How do you feel about Uncle Hawk?”

“Perfect! But uh,” he eyed his reflection in the dark window above the sink. “I’m more of a grandfather now, don’t you think?”

“You don’t look so old,” said Radar, dealing out his cards. Hawkeye muttered, still watching himself in the window, and ran his thin fingers through his hair.

“Why don’t you take the kids to a movie tomorrow?” asked BJ, picking up a used napkin from the floor. “It’s Saturday, and there’s a cinema ten minutes away.”

Finally, Hawkeye turned away from the window. “Sure!” he said, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, rocking on his heels. It was a familiar gesture BJ hadn’t realized that he’d missed. 

Around eleven o’clock, Radar excused himself and left for bed, leaving his cards in a neat little stack in the middle of the table. Hawkeye, not seeming to notice the time, stayed up until nearly two in the morning, finally asking to be shown his room when he saw BJ yawning. Nearly half asleep, BJ led him down the hall to his room, which had an extra door that opened up into the yard, and said goodnight. After the door shut behind him, BJ lingered in the hall for a moment, listening to Hawkeye’s familiar nighttime routine. There was the pacing back and forth as he brushed his teeth, the creak of the bedsprings and the heavy thunk as he sat down to take off his shoes and throw them into the corner. 

The footsteps made a circuit, then slowed and stopped right behind the door. BJ nearly stepped back in surprise as he heard the soft voice. 

“Beej?”

“Yeah?” he managed to say. Hawkeye didn’t seem surprised in the slightest.

“I’m okay.”

“Yeah,” said BJ, sighing. “I know.”

“Alright.”

“Goodnight, Hawk.”

“Goodnight.”

As he fell into bed beside Peg, she let out a deep sigh and turned over, one hand searching for his. He took it and held it close to his chest, pressing a kiss to her fingertips. The summer night was hot, and he left his legs uncovered as he lay down to sleep.

“How was he?” asked Peg, her voice heavy with sleep.

“Different,” he said, bluntly honest. “Just like Radar. Worse, maybe.”

“He’ll adjust,” she said, and the blankets shifted as she moved closer to him, resting her head against his shoulder. He moved his arm to accommodate her. “Just like Radar.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and watched the lights from a car driving past dance across the ceiling. “They’re both orphans now. I mean, he was so close with his father. He’s hiding it well, but I know he’s devastated.”

“Of course he is,” she murmured. “But you’ve fixed him before. When Trapper left.”

“Yeah.” God, when Trapper left. He almost resented the guy for leaving so much responsibility on his shoulders. Without even knowing him, Hawkeye managed to sense the paternal tendencies in BJ, and fell apart accordingly, somehow knowing that he would do his best to piece him back together. Coaxing the man back into a routine, bringing him breakfast when he wouldn’t leave his tent, even just getting him to shower; all of this was a monumental effort on BJ’s part. All these years later, he didn’t mind being handed the task once more, but he knew that things would not be so simple. Hawkeye’s father hadn’t just gone back to America. He was dead.

 

***

 

By the time BJ woke up the next morning, Hawkeye and both the kids were gone, Radar was off to work, and only Peg was still at the house. 

“You slept late,” she remarked as he sat down at the table, reaching for a plate of cold toast. “Hawkeye was up even earlier than me.”

“Impressive,” he said, spreading butter over his toast. “I think you could put the early bird out of business. Where’d he go? Don’t tell me he’s at the movies?”

“No, of course not. He and the kids are at the park, they’re going to the matinee. Do you have to be at the office today?” 

“No, I’ve got Mike filling in for me. Thought I’d take the week off to help Hawk settle in.”

She frowned and set down the book she had been reading. “What about your patients?”

He shrugged. “They’ll manage fine without me for the week.”

“I can tell you’re worried about him,” she said. “Will a week be enough?”

“If it’s not enough, I’ll take more time off,” he said, without meeting her eyes. His decision on the matter was final. He took time off for Radar, and he would take time off for Hawkeye, and he didn’t care what the people at work said about it. “Do you know what they’re going to see?”

“I think they said the Lone Ranger.”

***

BJ spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon pottering around the house, looking for things to do while Peg went out to run errands and get some much needed time to herself. After the third or fourth circuit of the house, he finally decided on pruning the hedges in the front yard, and that kept him occupied until a taxi pulled up in front of the house. The doors swung open, and Erin tumbled out, holding little BJ by the hand. Without greeting her father, she took her brother into the house. 

He straightened up, frowning, and watched while Hawkeye unfolded himself from the cab and paid the driver. Shoulders hunched, hands deep in his pockets, Hawkeye passed him on the front walk and hesitated for a moment, seeming on the verge of speaking. He settled for running a hand along the hedge, giving him an awkward smile.

“I never took you for a gardener,” he said. 

Something was wrong with him, BJ could see that clear as day. “Actually, I’m classically trained,” he said calmly, continuing to trim errant leaves. “I only became a doctor as a side profession.”

“Uh huh.”

“How was the movie?”

“The movie?” Hawkeye asked, feigning nonchalance. “Oh! The movie. Great, great film.”

“Mmhm,” he said, and leaned to one side, resting an elbow against the shrub. “Then how come the matinee only started a half an hour ago?”

Here it came; the blustering Hawkeye, the one who took long pauses while elbowing a friend for help, the one whose falsehoods were always outlandishly unbelievable. If only Colonel Potter were here, BJ thought. He’d see through to the truth in a second.

“Well, I mean, it’s a cowboy movie. Great stuff, but uh, you know. Not for little kids. Maybe too much for them. And we’d already been to the park for a while, and they were hungry. Yeah, they were hungry. Is there any lunch? I’m starved, let’s have lunch.” Hawkeye threw up his hands and beat a hasty retreat back towards the house, not stopping to see if his friend had followed him.

“Hawk?”

The other man froze, then turned with a bewildered smile. A smile that said, please believe me. “Yeah?”

BJ sighed. “There’s potato salad and jelly for sandwiches in the refrigerator.” 

***

“Hey.” 

Hawkeye turned, a terrified expression his face. Everyone, as far as he knew, had gone to sleep hours ago. BJ stood in the doorway, one hand still curled around the knob, staring at the small brown bottle clutched in the (bony) hand of his friend. There was a silence that lasted for only a minute, but seemed to stretch into hours, maybe years. Then BJ cleared his throat, stepped into his room, and shut the door.

“I came to talk,” he said, and drew up a chair next to his bed, where Hawkeye still stood, feeling frozen in place. “To see how you were doing.”

Something like a terrible relief was crashing through his body, the horrifying thought that BJ  _ knew,  _ would see him like this, mixed with the wonderful reassurance that someone finally knew, someone could finally understand, that he didn’t have to hide this awful secret. Someone who could help. Someone who was a friend.

“Imipramine,” he said, in lieu of a proper reply. “I’m starting off on ten milligrams, just to make sure there aren’t any unforeseen side effects.”

BJ said nothing, and watched Hawkeye sit down on the edge of the bed, still holding the bottle. 

“They’re calling it anxiety neurosis, a psychoneurotic disorder. Some people just call it a stress reaction.” He rolled the bottle in his hand, listening to the light tinkle the pills made against the glass. “Luckily, I can prescribe it to myself. If I weren’t a doctor, I wouldn’t be getting treatment at all, and that’s because I’m a doctor. There’s your irony for you. You know what they’re saying? That anyone not directly involved in combat can’t have a - a post-war stress reaction. Which - I mean, it’s a lie, isn’t it? It’s a lie. I didn’t spend that time in a loony bin because - because, I don’t know, because - well. I mean, we were  _ right there,  _ Beej. Me and Trap, we disabled a bomb, with nothing but stethoscopes and our socks on. Not that we  _ only  _ had the stethoscopes and socks on, we were dressed, but you know what I -”

“Do you mind if I give you a check up?” BJ asked. Hawkeye’s mouth fell open, and he stared at him, incredulous for a moment, before nodding. “Let me get my kit.” 

After a short minute, during which Hawkeye considered gathering his things and running out into the night like a madman, BJ returned, doctor’s bag in hand. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he snapped the case open and withdrew a stethoscope (red, specially ordered by Peg for a birthday present). Inserting the nubbins into his ears, he pressed the cool silver disk against the man’s back, and without being asked, Hawkeye inhaled deeply. BJ listened through the thin cotton of Hawkeye’s undershirt and shifted the position of the chestpiece. 

“Have you always had that nervous twitch?” he asked, pointing to Hawkeye’s knee, which was jogging up and down at a feverish pace. 

“Just picked it up,” he replied, and the movement slowed.

“Hm,” BJ grunted, and unhooked the stethoscope from his ears. “Let me see your wrist.” Hawkeye hesitated for the barest second before reaching out towards BJ. He let out a barely audible hiss as BJ pressed his fingers against a vein.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s…” he trailed off, and didn’t offer an explanation. BJ asked for none and listened to his pulse race against his finger. 

“Feeling nervous?” he asked, frowning. Hawkeye shook his head. “I assume you already know what I’m going to tell you?”

“Hypertension.” 

BJ nodded and released his wrist. “Pretty serious hypertension, too.” 

Withdrawing his arm, he cradled it for a moment, evaluating. “So did Erin tell you?” He coughed out a laugh when BJ didn’t answer, shaking his head. “She pinkie promised not to. God. I just… I didn’t want you to worry. I’ve got too many people worrying about me. God, Beej. I’m so sorry. I didn’t let them see, I swear.”

Reaching into his bag, BJ pulled out a small flashlight, and gently tilted Hawkeye’s head back to examine his eyes. Even with the bright light, they barely constricted. “Do you know about your pupils?” he asked, and didn’t wait for answer before continuing. “They’re extremely dilated. That’s a sign of stress.”

“I just, you know, ducked into the bathroom,” he babbled on, staring up at the ceiling long after BJ had taken the flashlight away. “I didn’t know it would be so loud in there. If it wasn’t so loud, I think I could have stood it. But however they’re pumping that sound in, it’s so… God, it sounds so realistic. Like there’s someone firing off rounds right over your shoulder.”

Replacing the flashlight, BJ removed a small glass bottle of pills from his bag and shook two into his hand. “I want you to take these tonight. It’s a barbiturate.”

Hawkeye accepted them and held one up to the light. “I thought they gave these to soldiers, to help them deal with the heat.”

Snapping the case closed, BJ rose from the bed and stretched, reaching forward. “It’s also a sedative. I’ve been using it to treat anxiety and insomnia in my own patients. Just take one for now, if it doesn’t kick in within the hour, take the other one. If that doesn’t work, wake me up.” He gathered his case, tightened the cord on his bathrobe, and headed for the door.

“Wake you up, what for?”

He turned and offered Hawkeye a comforting smile. “To keep you company.”

Hawkeye watched as the other man closed the door gently behind him, letting it swing closed without making a sound, a habit leftover from raising two children who were light sleepers. He waited for the footsteps to fade down the hall before releasing a heavy sigh and slumped over, resting his head in his hands. 

Finally, he straightened, and dry swallowed both pills at once. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a week since Hawkeye came to stay with BJ after the death of his father, and things have been rough for everyone. Hawkeye’s nights are plagued with nightmares and interrupted sleep, and the strain is starting to take its toll on BJ, who still has to face his role as a trauma surgeon in an ICU.

The morning began clear, bright, and far too early. BJ left his house in a fog, driving to the hospital on autopilot with a thermos of coffee perched on the stack of folders that lived on the passenger’s seat. He made his rounds in ICU with a quiet efficiency, choosing to talk as little as possible, thankful for the uneventfulness of the previous night. Meetings with the other trauma surgeons were short and sweet; the only new patients from the night before were two men who had gotten into a drunken fight, and a little girl who needed her appendix taken out. Talking around yawns, he discussed patient progress with his team on the upper floor, moving between rooms with increasing relief as he completed his rounds.

     Finally, once every patient was consulted and accounted for, he headed to the break room for a cup of the muddy hospital coffee, thankful for the lack of scheduled surgeries. Two nurses, chatting over a shared sleeve of crackers, stopped their conversation to let him know the coffee machine was broken, and he settled for a glass of water. As he settled onto the break room’s overstuffed couch, the man settled on its far corner folded down the top of his newspaper, white-bearded face split in a wide grin.

     “Morning, Hunnicutt; nice to see you back,” he said, and folded his newspaper to tuck under one folded knee.

     Smiling, BJ set down his glass on the coffee table to lean over and shake the other doctor’s hand. “Happy to be back, Dr. Thur.”

     “Everything okay at home?” asked Thur, carefully polite when referencing BJ’s week-long, mostly unexplained departure from the hospital to help Hawkeye get settled. To BJ, the week had not been nearly enough, but he had already been receiving panicked phone calls from the staff barely two days into his hiatus, and the pressure to return was too great.

     He took a moment to think before answering, a million excuses running through his head. “A little rough,” he finally answered, choosing to dodge a more detailed answer.

     “Family trouble?” said Thur, and sighed at BJ’s silence. “Hunnicutt, I consider us friends. Now, I chose not to ask questions about your absence from the beginning, but you’ve got bags under your eyes big enough to pack an elephant in, and I’ve never seen you anything but clean shaven. Maybe you’re having an off day, maybe not, but something just doesn’t seem right to me.”

     BJ grimaced and ran a hand along the stubble peppering his jaw, surprised at his carelessness. “Well don’t spare my feelings,” he joked, feigning embarrassment. A frown from the other man stopped his next line in its tracks, and he sighed, looking at his knees. “It’s nothing big, really.”

     “If it’s nothing big, then you wouldn’t have taken time off,” said Thur, a gentle tone belying his concern.

     “It - it was just a family emergency,” he said with a helpless shrug. He didn’t feel comfortable mentioning Hawkeye, much less the man’s night terrors that had been keeping the rest of the family awake. “We’re just trying to get settled.”

     “Hunnicutt,” said Thur, then softened. “BJ. I’d like to know if there’s something I can do to help. If things at home still aren’t going well, then I can give you the time you need to get things taken care of. But I can’t help you unless you talk to me about it.”

     BJ frowned, resentment stirring in his stomach. “We, are fine. I took my time off, and that’s all I need. I’m back now, don’t worry about it.”

     “I’m not trying to make you feel like a charity case,” Thur began, “It’s just that you -”

     “It’s not me that needs the help!” snapped BJ, and regretted it instantly. He rose from the couch, letting out a sharp breath, and backed towards the door. “I didn’t have a good night’s sleep, and I let it affect me, that’s all. It’s not like I’m falling apart or something.”

     Thur stood, one hand held out to the younger doctor in a gesture of appeal. “It certainly wasn’t my intention to offend you,” he said. “If I overstepped my boundaries, then I apologize.”

     “Well,” said BJ, still too stirred up to be as contrite as he should have. “That’s alright, just let me know next time if my shirt’s too wrinkled or my hair isn’t combed straight. Might be a sign of emotional distress that I didn’t know about.”

     Abandoning his glass of water, he marched out of the break room and in the direction of his office, avoiding the shocked gaze of the two nurses, ignoring their crackers in favor of his tantrum. Mentally kicking himself, but still too angry to go back and apologize for his behavior, BJ stomped through the halls and back to his office. He barely had a minute to sit down and relax before a nurse stepped in.

     “Dr. Hunnicutt?”

     He didn’t bother to raise his head and looked at her feet instead, where he was arrested by a bright, fresh drop of blood resting on the toe of her white shoe. “What’s happened?” he demanded, pushing back his chair.

     “There’s been a car accident,” she reported, matching his pace as he hurried to the OR, dropping his watch into the pocket of his lab coat as he went. “White male, mid twenties, caught in the stomach by shrapnel from the wreckage.”

     “Any passengers?”

     “He was the passenger; the driver is fine, superficial cuts that were treated in the ambulance.”

     As BJ scrubbed in preparation for the surgery, he was joined at the sink by one of their new techs, a young man who he dimly recalled as being named Erickson. He looked nervous, hands shaking as he poured too much soap into his palms.

     Erickson caught his eye as he tied on his face mask and shrugged. “I’ve never done an emergency surgery like this before,” he admitted. “Just scheduled stuff.”

     “Well then you’re lucky you’re not actually performing the surgery,” said BJ, fighting back annoyance as he rushed into the OR. It wasn’t his job to reassure nervous techs who never did more than push a broom through the leftover mess of surgery.

     The man lying on the table was pale as a sheet, a mess of blood and exposed organs leaking out of his stomach like an unraveled sweater, and as weak as he was, he was still fighting. One hand was clutching the ruins of his stomach, the other was pushing the anesthesiologist’s hand away from his face, fighting against the mask.

     “Get the hell off me!” he shrieked at her, and managed to smack the mask out of her hand. It went clattering to the floor and was promptly grabbed by a tech, who fit the hose with a sanitary replacement, and handed it back to the anesthesiologist. A nurse stepped in, attempting to restrain the man, hands flying to stop him from hurting himself any more than the car wreck already did.  

     Without stopping to ask questions, BJ ran to the table and pulled the nurse away by the shoulder, being as gentle as he could under the circumstances. “Step back, Gina, you’re making it worse,” he told her.

     “I don’t know what to do!”

     “I do,” he said, and shooed the other tech away. The man on the table was still crying out, both from pain and fear, gulping huge breaths of air and reaching out for something only he could see. It was painfully familiar for BJ; the last time he had seen this behavior was just last night, during one of Hawkeye’s increasingly regular night terrors. He learned early on that touch was a cause for panic rather than comfort, and he stepped back a pace to give the patient room.

     “Calm down, we’re doctors,” he said to the patient, who  whipped his head around to fix him with a wild stare. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

     “His name is Robert,” whispered Gina from behind him.

     “Okay, Robert?” said BJ, and the man seemed distracted momentarily from his fear by the sound of his name. “Robert. Good. We’re here to help you. The mask is to give you anesthesia so we can treat your wound.” Robert seemed to quiet, head sinking back.

     BJ made the mistake of stepping forward, and Robert began to thrash again, trying to get up from the table and bleeding everywhere at the same time. “He’s gonna kill himself if he keeps this up, get a sedative!” BJ shouted to the nurse, jumping forward to catch the patient from rolling off the table.

     Shouting, Robert fought against him, cursing as BJ wrestled him back onto the table. “Get off me! Get off me, my buddy’s still outside, I wanna see him first, dammit! You’re not knocking me out!”

     A door slammed and Erickson raced in, clutching a hypodermic wrapped in gauze. “I’ve got the sedative!” he cried, passing it to BJ.

     Ripping off the sleeve of the man’s tattered shirt, ignoring the bulky scissors standing by for such a procedure, BJ plunged the needle as accurately as he could into his bicep, and depressed the plunger.

     “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” cried Robert, his movements already slowed by the sedative effects. “Who’s the CO around here?”

     “Colonel Potter,” BJ answered without thinking, the answer springing to his lips as readily as the answer for what color the sky was. Behind him, a group of techs, assistants, and nurses stood by, waiting for him to give them the okay to finish prepping the patient, but he felt frozen in place. Like cold water filling his shoes, memories of a different OR came flooding back from behind the dams he’d built to keep them out, and he blinked hard, trying to force himself to focus on the present. The man’s eyelids fluttered, and his rigid, unyielding body went soft in BJ’s hands.

     “Okay,” said BJ, voice hoarse. “Okay. Let’s get started.” Ignoring the slight trembling of his hands, he discarded the used needle and stepped over to a nurse to reglove, cautious of the filthy shirt he had been handling moments before.

     As he stepped back to the patient, whose face was now mercifully hidden behind a surgical screen, Gina positioned the equipment cart near his right hip, where he preferred it. The patient was now quiet and anonymous, except for a small tattoo on his right forearm. As the initial incisions were made, he found himself catching glimpses of it in his peripheral vision; an anchor, wrapped in a banner printed with the letters ‘USN’.

     The clatter of the instruments was magnified by the deathly silence in the OR, and even the most talkative of the staff members seemed drawn and pale, shaken by the patient’s outburst. As he worked, he tried to ignore the searching eyes of Gina, one of the few staff members he had grown close with over the last few years. She couldn’t know what was bothering him; he had chosen not to talk about his service in Korea, preferring to forget and try to move on. Avoiding her gaze, he began to repair a torn section of intestine, removing fragments of metal and glass that a mere thirty minutes ago, had been a solid piece of car.

     A shard of glass dropped into a metal, kidney-shaped pan with a familiar clink, and he cringed at the sound.

     “Doctor?” said Gina, her gentle voice like a gunshot in the utter silence.

     The organs and muscles in front of him, normally so familiar and orderly in their own, chaotic way, seemed to writhe before his eyes, and he nearly dropped the clamp he was trying to fasten onto an artery. Gina, sensing his distress, took it from him and performed the action herself.

     “Thank you, Baker,” he murmured.

     “My last name is Hampton, sir,” she said, her eyes anxious above her white mask.

     “Yes, of course it is.”

     BJ swallowed and struggled to push down his rising sense of dread, and realized he was gripping the edge of the table with his left hand, smearing the cold steel with blood. “I - I need suction here, nurse,” he said, looking down at a well of blood growing in his patient’s foregut.

     As the blood was siphoned away, he was visited by a feeling of panic that he had not experienced since his early days at the MASH. He had rarely lost his cool then, but on one of the few occasions he had, Colonel Potter had stepped in and guided him, a calm voice guiding his actions with gentle surety. Now, as his stomach turned and knotted, he wished desperately for the man to appear at his side, the one constant source of comfort in the middle of one big discomfort.

     “Retraction,” he ordered, unable to disguise the quaver in his voice. The edges of the room were fading into darkness, the only bright spot that remained was the patient’s open gut, illuminated by the hot white lamps. Was this how Hawkeye felt in the depths of his nightmares?

     “Doctor,” asked an assistant, brow drawn, “Are you able to finish the operation?”

     “I’m fine,” he barked, tossing a saturated sponge over his shoulder. His stomach was swimming, his breath was coming in short bursts, but he’d be damned if he couldn’t pull through for the patient. Unbidden, a memory of Frank leapt to his mind; panicking, obstinately refusing help, and unable to help his patient. But Hawkeye couldn’t step in for him now, and Potter wasn’t there to relay instructions from across the room.

     A wave of terror crashed over him, leaving him reeling, and he stumbled back from the table, dropping his forceps. They fell to the floor, leaving a splatter of blood where they landed. Immediately, the assistants crowded around the table, picking up where he left off, packing the area off with gauze before the carefully manipulated tissue could slip back into place.

     “Doctor!” called Gina, “Dr. Hunnicutt!”

     BJ said nothing and stood, trembling, unable to move.

     “Get Dr. Stoddard in here, now!”

     Unable to protest or even make an excuse, BJ was escorted out of the room by a nurse and left to sit in an empty waiting room. Feeling helpless, he sat with his arms folded tightly against his chest, trying and failing to calm himself. Eventually, the same nurse reentered the room with a blanket and a mug of coffee, a sympathetic expression fixed on her face. He accepted the coffee and refused the blanket, ignoring her requests for details of his condition. She held out an unfolded paper napkin, and after a moment of confusion, he realized what she wanted and dropped his bloodied gloves into the napkin. When she finally left, carrying his surgical gown and wrapped gloves, he sat in silence, staring at a white placard on the receptionists desk without reading the words.

     “Dr. Hunnicutt to see Dr. Thur. Dr. Hunnicutt to see Dr. Thur,” said a voice over the PA, and he startled, slopping coffee over the rim of his mug.

     Apprehensive of what was to come, he left his mug behind on top of a magazine, and made the long, winding trip down to Thur’s office on the first floor. He hesitated outside the door, taking a moment to catch his breath before entering the room.

     The chief of surgery sat behind a stack of paperwork that alway seemed the same, towering height whenever BJ saw it, regardless of how much time was spent chiseling away at it. A gooseneck lamp shed light on a silver-framed photo of a younger Thur and his family, and taking up the center of his desk was a sleek typewriter, always prepared with a sheet of paper fed into the carriage. As BJ entered, hands deep in his pockets like a scolded child, Thur glanced up from his work, raising a pair of hoary eyebrows.

     “Welcome, Hunnicutt,” he said. “Please, have a seat.” He waited for BJ to settle himself before continuing, broad hands folded in front of his chest. “I’ve been informed that there was an incident today during surgery.”

     “Yes sir, and I apologize, there’s no ex -”

     “And I understand that this took place immediately following our conversation in the break room,” said Thur, overriding his apology. “Hunnicutt, I expressed concern for you today. You seemed tired and out of sorts, but you very firmly insisted that everything was fine, and now I find out that you panicked during surgery, and had to be covered by Dr. Stoddard.”

     He said nothing and stared at the nameplate on Thur’s desk, face hot with shame.

     “The patient is taken care of and resting quietly in post-op; your mistake did not cost him his life.”

     “Thank God,” said BJ, voice hoarse.

     “Accountability is vitally important in the medical world,” said Thur, his face grim. “We, of all people, should know that we hold ourselves to the highest standards. You do understand, that if you are unwell or incapable of operating, that you are required to inform the rest of staff so that accommodations can be made. We cannot risk the lives of our patients.”

     “I understand.”

     “Do you?” demanded Thur, eyebrows meeting in a scowl. “Because based on your behavior today, I don’t think you do.”

     BJ flushed red. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry sir. There’s no excuse for my behavior.”

     The older man seemed to lose some of his fire and sat back, regarding BJ. “I know. That’s why it worries me so much. Are you willing to tell me the truth now about what’s been going on with you?”

     “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said BJ, attempting to sidestep the question.

     “If you cannot provide justification for your behavior today,” said Thur, his voice calm despite the threat in his words, “Then I’ll be forced to believe that your actions were born out of malicious disregard for your patient’s health.”

     The air seemed to go out of the room. “That isn’t true,” said BJ, trying not to shrink into his chair. Thur had never spoken to him in such a way before. “I want to explain… I just don’t feel like I can.”

     Thur raised an eyebrow. “You started working here five years ago. When you started, you were thin, quiet, and jumpy. Since then, you’ve rounded out some and made a few friends. Not many, but a few. Everything was fine up until today, when a veteran came in, hysterical, and asked for your commanding officer. Now I don’t need you to tell me what I already know, but it’d sure be nice not to have to read between the lines.”

     Feeling humiliated and defeated, he laced his fingers together and squeezed, trying to release some of the pressure he was feeling. Thur waited, impassive. “My CO was a man called Sherman Potter, regular army,” said BJ, barely loud enough to be heard over the hum of the traffic outside. “He’s a good man, like a second father to me. I haven’t thought about him in five years. I didn’t want to. Then, this past week, a friend came to stay with us, and…”

     Thur nodded. “This friend, was he or she the reason you took off work?”

     “Yes,” he said, surprising himself with the truth. “His father died, and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving him to live on his own. We’re not entirely sure yet, but I think he’ll be staying with us permanently.”

     “And is he a veteran as well?”

     “Yes.”

     “I imagine he brought a lot of bad memories with him. That’s very kind of you to help him out,” said Thur, and withdrew a form from the pile of papers on his desk. “I take it this visit hasn’t been very relaxing?”

      “Not very,” admitted BJ, watching as Thur began to fill out the form in a steady hand. “Nobody’s been getting very much sleep. I hoped it would sort itself out within a week, but I can see now that was a foolish hope.”

     Thur leaned over the desk to pass him a pen, which BJ accepted with confusion. “I won’t ask questions you’re uncomfortable answering,” he said. “That won’t help anything. But I can’t allow you to come in tomorrow in this sort of state. I’d like you to take another week off, and consider seeking some form of therapy or psychiatric help in the meantime.” He slid the form across the desk, which BJ recognized as a paid time off form.

     “Excuse me?” he protested, rising from his chair. “I don’t need psychiatric help.”

     “Your flare-up today says you do,” Thur said, gruff and commanding. “I’m not saying I won’t accept you back without it, but I strongly recommend it. If you like, I can put you in contact with a psychiatrist who deals specifically with cases like yours.”

     BJ stared at him, open-mouthed, and let out an incredulous laugh. “You’ve got to be joking,” he said, knowing full well the other doctor was not. “I’ve got a wife, two children, and a man who’s falling apart at the seams to take care of. The company clerk got a new apartment and left me holding the bag. The  lawn needs mowing, our bathroom sink is leaking, and our neighbor keeps leaving his bins in our driveway. I don’t need a psychiatrist, I need a nanny and a janitor.”

     “Take the time off anyway,” said Thur, tapping a finger towards the line where BJ should sign. “At least for the sake of your patients. They don’t need a stressed out, unstable doctor.”

     Chagrined, BJ bent down and signed the paper. There was a tense, silent pause while he capped the pen and handed it back to Thur, who accepted it with a mixture of resolve and regret. They looked at each other, BJ trying to hold back from pleading for a second chance, Thur using the firmly sympathetic expression he so often employed when telling his patients a piece of tough news. Finally, BJ nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and left to go pack up for the trip home, angry tears smarting in his eyes. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the incident in the OR, BJ is home again to face another sleepless night with Hawkeye, who is rapidly losing hope of recovery. BJ is spiraling and either can’t or won’t admit it, and refuses to get the support he needs. How can he take care of Hawkeye when he’s falling apart himself?

The ride home seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, leaving BJ no time to parse through his thoughts, and more importantly, think up an excuse to tell Peg. The thought of telling her what had happened in OR, of seeing her sweet face twist in confusion and dismay, was like a knife to his heart. He lingered, parked in the driveway, putting off stepping out of the car for as long as possible. When he had gone through every option, every white lie he could think of, and failed to come up with anything plausible, he stepped out of the car and made the walk up to the house. Normally he relished coming home after a long day; the sidewalk was bordered with bushes he had planted and trimmed himself, dotted with small white flowers poking through glossy leaves, and there was usually a welcoming chalk drawing left behind by Erin, drawn hastily before school. But today, he viewed the faded heart on the ground with remorse, knowing that her disrupted sleep was sending her out to the schoolbus later and later. The heart was drawn three days ago, and the bright pink was dissolving into the sidewalk.

     He sidled in through the front door, hoping not to find Peg in the living room, reading a book and waiting for an explanation for his early arrival home. The living room was empty, however, and curiously quiet, given that both of his children should have been home from school. Curious, BJ poked his head into the hall - silent, all of the doors closed - and headed to the kitchen.

     Peg was standing at the counter, her golden hair pinned back with a plastic Scottie dog clip that she told him she’d owned since childhood. One hand was hesitating between two pages of a cookbook, the other was reaching into the spice cabinet, and the kitchen was thick with steam billowing over the edge of a cookpot on the stove. There was a line between her eyebrows that he was unused to seeing; a sign of stress and worry that she only allowed to appear when no one was looking. She hadn’t seen him yet, hovering in the doorway, and he cleared his throat, hoping not to scare her.

     She turned away from her cookbook, an expression of forced cheeriness on her face that he associated with unwanted visitors, which vanished instantly when she saw who was asking for her attention. “BJ!” she exclaimed, a genuine smile replacing the pained one. “I thought you were Hawkeye.”

     Refraining from commenting on her first reaction, he stepped into her arms and kissed her quickly, pulling back to ask, “Where are the kids? I thought they’d be home from school by now.”

     “Oh,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “Well, I had a thought while you were gone - and I probably should have waited to talk to you first, but my mother stopped by earlier, and it seemed better to just send the kids with her right away.”

     “Send them with her?”

     Peg let out an unhappy sigh. “I love Hawkeye, I really do,” she said carefully, “But with everything that’s been going on, the kids haven’t been getting much sleep, and I thought it would be good for them to spend a night where they can get a full rest.” She leaned away from him to read his expression.

     “No, that’s just perfect,” he said, surprising himself by feeling relieved. “I wish I’d thought of it sooner. And it’s great timing; there’s no school tomorrow, so you won’t have to worry about that.”

     She smiled and stepped back into his embrace, squeezing her arms around his middle. “I’m glad you think so. So, how was your first day back? You’re home a little earlier than usual.” There was a careful guardedness in her words that stung him; he wasn’t used to having to tiptoe around his marriage like this.

     “It was fine, just wrapped up a little earlier than I expected,” he lied, then paused and took a look around the kitchen. “Things are a little quieter than usual. Where’s Hawkeye? Don’t tell me he finally went out today?”

     “Not yet,” she said, a slight edge in her voice that made him feel even worse. “He’s been out in the garden most of the day, which I guess is an improvement. He doesn’t leave his room when you’re not home.” She turned away from him and went back to her cookbook, flipping over a page that didn’t need to be turned.

     Chilled by her reaction, he left without a word and headed into the backyard, closing the screen door behind him as quietly as he could. He was greeted with a gust of wind that stirred the tops of trees, still warm and fragrant with summer blossoms that had yet to shrivel and fall. Looking out across the yard, closed in with the white fence he built during his first summer back from Korea, he could see the hunched form of Hawkeye, kneeling among the plants in Peg’s tiny herb garden.

     Crossing the grass, he reached the edge of the dirt patch and prodded its small chicken wire fence with one foot, watching as Hawkeye bent far enough over that his nose touched the dirt. “Drop something?” he asked.

     Hawkeye straightened up and squinted at him. His blue cardigan, already too large for him, seemed to have stretched out far enough to fit two people. The knees of his pants, also too large, were stained with grass and dirt, and with the dark circles under his eyes, he could have passed for homeless. “Just my sanity,” he said, with only the ghost of a smile. “You’re home early, unless I’ve somehow lost track of time between weeding and getting a farmer’s tan.”

     “You don’t have to do this, you know,” said BJ, and Hawkeye shrugged. “Actually, I’m pretty sure Peg would like it if you stopped. You’ve already killed her basil plant.”

     Hawkeye touched the brown, withered leaves with a rueful look. “All I did was water it,” he said, sounding somewhat indignant. “It’s not my fault plants don’t like me.”

     Another breeze stirred the grass, ruffling their hair and bending the delicate stems of Peg’s herbs. Hawkeye shivered despite the warmth of the day, and pulled the sleeves of his cardigan down past his hands.

     “You should come inside,” suggested BJ, extending a hand to help him up. “Peg’s about halfway done with dinner; she made that soup you like.”

     Ignoring the proffered hand, Hawkeye turned away to watch the sun, just beginning to sink behind a stand of trees. “Do you really think I should quit gardening? It’s just - I have nothing to do but sit around wait to go to sleep, and it’s driving me buggy. At least with Radar around, I had someone to talk to until he left for second shift.”

     “So talk to Peg; she’s a great listener, I promise.”

     “No, I’m under her feet enough as it is,” he said, and stood, brushing dirt from the seat of his pants. There was mud caking his shoes, and BJ made a mental note to try and find him a pair of rain boots. “Besides, what would I talk to her about? Hi Peg, want to hear about all the times me and your husband nearly died? My ten favorite resections? How many different ways a man can lose his leg?”

     BJ flinched and looked away; Hawkeye caught his eye and shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Beej. I just feel bad for all the trouble I’ve brought with me,” he said.

     “Nothing I wasn’t prepared for,” said BJ, lying through his teeth and praying to God that Hawkeye couldn’t hear it. “And I can promise you that Peg doesn’t think you’re in the way. I’m sure she appreciates your company while I’m gone.”

     Hawkeye scoffed. “Yeah, because she sent the kids away for no reason. Certainly not because I’m keeping everyone awake all night, including you. And definitely not because I’m as much fun to have around the house as an enema.”

     “Hawk,” said BJ, a note of reproach in his voice, but he couldn’t bring himself to make up a reason for Hawkeye to feel less guilty. It was true, the sleepless nights were a strain, and it was beginning to show in everyone. Besides pottering around in the backyard, Hawkeye had yet to leave the house since his disastrous trip to the movies, and spent most of the day secluded in his room, reading through BJ’s books and keeping up a correspondence with a few people who never seemed to write back.

     “Because that’s what Erin needs, after spending a third her life separated from her father, to get sent off to grandma’s house because one of his war buddies is having a mental breakdown.” Hawkeye shook his head.

     “You’re not having a breakdown,” said BJ, a little too sharply. “We just need to figure out a solution for your - whatever they are, nightmares, night terrors. We’ll figure it out. It’s barely been over a week since you got here, you’ve got to give it time.”

     A moment passed while Hawkeye stared down at the grass, turned yellow and gold by the light of the setting sun. “Sure, if you can stand being around me for that long,” he said, and stooped down to gather up his bucket of gardening tools. “I know I can’t.”

     “You’re being too hard on yourself,” said BJ, following Hawkeye as he walked the bucket to set down against the side of the house. “You told me what was going on in your letters, I knew this was coming when I invited you out here.”

     “I think we’re kind of stretching the limits of hospitality at this point, don’t you?” said Hawkeye with a sarcastic, bitter smile.

     “Listen,” he replied, reaching out to set a hand on the other man’s shoulder, “You’re honestly my best friend. As hard as it is, as long as it takes, I want to help you get better. You don’t have to feel guilty.”

     Hawkeye let out a frenzied laugh. “And what if it takes years? What if ‘getting better’ never comes? What if your kids are moved out and married with kids of their own, and old Mr. Pierce is still living in your back room, getting grayer and thinner by the day until I finally croak from sheer stress? What then?”

     “Hawkeye,” said BJ, squeezing his shoulder. “It’s not going to be like that. If we can’t figure this out by the time Ben and Erin get back, then I’ll take you up to Sacramento and we’ll get a sleep study done, maybe take you to a psychiatrist. This isn’t as unfixable as you’re making it out to be.”

     He hesitated, brow creased, and after a moment, he broke into a tiny grin. “I still can’t believe you named a kid after me.”

     Startling himself, BJ actually let out a laugh. “Well, Benjamin John Hunnicutt is a good name, and when he tells people his name is BJ, at least it’ll actually stand for something.”

     “I still refuse to believe that your legal name is BJ,” said Hawkeye, looking faintly happy for the first time in days. “I can’t believe the army let you put that on your official forms!”

     “Me neither,” said BJ, the smile dropping from his face. “Come on, let’s go in for dinner. We’re keeping Peg waiting.” Hawkeye frowned at the abrupt change in his demeanor, but followed him without a word, sparing a glance over his shoulder towards the herb garden, swaying in the gathering wind.

                                                       ***

     That night, a storm that no one had been expecting broke over Mill Valley, bringing high winds and lashing rains that rattled the shutters. Already restless from the day’s events, BJ declined to go to bed, sending Peg off alone with a goodnight kiss, and sat up in the living room, looking over his patient’s records. At around midnight, Hawkeye came creeping down the hallway, looking wary, and startled when he found BJ still awake in the living room. After a few muttered explanations, Hawkeye darted back down the hall and into his room, and BJ pretended that he didn’t know about the rapidly draining bottle of scotch in an upper kitchen cabinet.

     Accompanied only by the yellow light of the side table lamp, BJ fought off sleep with the Hawkeye Pierce method of a slowly sipped glass of spirits and a medical journal. His reading was sporadic at best, and nonexistent at worst, his churning thoughts constantly interrupting and forcing his attention away from the page. On one hand, he could justify his forced insomnia by assuming that Hawkeye would wake him up soon after he dropped off to sleep anyway, but on the other, he knew that his own thoughts would keep him tossing and turning far into the night.

     Dinner had been a trainwreck. Peg was quiet and reserved, speaking only when necessary, and BJ caught her looking towards the children’s empty places more than once. Hawkeye made the mistake of asking why he had gotten home from work so early, misinterpreted BJ’s terrified silence, and left for his room a few minutes later without finishing his food. As for BJ himself, he stirred his soup without eating, staring at the salt shaker and forgetting to speak. Eventually, the miserable affair ended, and he was free to isolate himself by engrossing himself in the work he had brought home.

     All at once, he realized he was beginning to doze, and jerked himself awake. Blinking hard, he shook his head and tried to focus on the words in front of him. It happened to be a case study on postwar stress reactions, an all-too popular topic in medicine lately, and he shuffled it to the bottom of the stack. The next item of reading material was an essay on the effects of vaccinations administered to pregnant women; he had never planned to be a pediatrician, and likely would never become one, but he settled into it with a grim determination to distract himself.

     Somewhere around the third paragraph, he heard the first telltale sign; a muffled thunk from the direction of Hawkeye’s room. He looked up, tilting his head towards the sound, and abandoned his stack of paper immediately afterwards when he heard a muffled shout.

     As he hurried down the hall, the door to his bedroom opened, and Peg stepped out, looking befuddled. “Is he -?” she asked, squinting at him with sleep-filled eyes.

     “Go back to bed, I’ll handle it,” he said, shutting the door behind her as she moved back into the bedroom.

     BJ stopped at the threshold of Hawkeye’s room, one hand curled around the doorknob, and waited, hoping that perhaps he wouldn’t be needed that night. A crash as something fell and shattered on the floor told him that it was a false hope. He opened the door cautiously, and squinted against the inner darkness. He reached back and flipped on the hall light, opening the door wide enough to allow some of the illumination into the bedroom. By its soft glow, he could see a pile of books and a picture frame on the floor, soaking in the contents of a broken aftershave bottle. As he looked around for Hawkeye, he was hit with the sudden smell of unwashed clothes and the unmistakable smell of an open bottle of liquor hidden somewhere in the room. There was a quiet moan, and BJ pushed past his discomfort and crept into the room, trying not to let too much light in.

     “Hawk?” he whispered, and experienced a jolt of fear as he spotted Hawkeye, lurking in the corner with his head down. He drew a deep breath and let it out in a rush; it was still unexpected and frightening to see him out of bed, wandering around in the dark with no idea of where he really was.

    The lamp next to the bed was still undisturbed, so he switched it on to get a better view of the room. Aside from the clothes spilling out of Hawkeye’s suitcase, still not fully unpacked, and the ruined books and aftershave, nothing else was out of place. The overpowering scent of aftershave was filling the room, and he resolved to mop it up as soon as he could get Hawkeye settled into bed again. Behind him, Hawkeye was rocking on his feet, and began to pace, muttering something to himself that BJ couldn’t make out.

     “Are you awake?” he asked; it was a perfunctory question, one he already knew the answer to, but he asked it anyway, hoping that tonight would be the night Hawkeye would snap out of it on his own. Hawkeye didn’t answer; his breathing was fast and harsh, and something was drawing his attention towards a corner of the room, something BJ couldn’t see.

     “Trapper?” said Hawkeye, low and urgent, startling BJ with the first coherent thing he’d said so far that week. “Trapper,” he repeated, scared now, a tremor in his voice that made BJ’s gut clench.

     Reaching out, BJ caught him by the wrist and tugged him back towards the bed, careful not to be rough enough to wake him. He’d learned a lot in the past week, and had figured out by trial and error that the best thing to do was to let Hawkeye work through whatever he was dealing with instead of waking him up. It seemed like trying to shake him out of his nightmare only made it worse, trapping him further in the dream and only intensifying his fear. Hawkeye, following the gentle pull on his arm, stumbled into the bed, eyes wide and unseeing, and began to worry at the sheets. BJ performed his usual routine; checking his pulse, temperature, making sure there weren’t any cuts or bruises from bumping against sharp corners. While he did this, Hawkeye was never quite still, always pulling against him or rocking from side to side, mumbling disjointed sentences that never quite formed real words.

     Whatever was going on in Hawkeye’s head was getting worse; he pulled himself off the bed and took to pacing around the room, shouting and growing more and more agitated. BJ watched, feeling helpless, and waited for Hawkeye to tire himself out or calm down, whichever came first. He hated himself for being able to do nothing, hated himself for feeling scared of another man’s nightmare. Hawkeye could never remember what happened when he woke up, but from the few words BJ was able to make out, it was clear he was dreaming about Korea.

     As time dragged on, punctuated by Hawkeye’s intermittent cries and rambling, he began to lose some of his manic energy, and came to a stop in the middle of the room, facing the door. BJ rose from the bed, anticipating the unexpected, prepared to either catch him or stop him from hurting himself. When nothing happened, he let out a sigh of relief; stillness usually indicated that the nightmare was over.

     Taking Hawkeye by the arm once more, he led him to the bed and helped him lay down, more guiding his tumble downwards than actually letting him lay down on his own. Once Hawkeye was settled, BJ took his pulse again, reassured by its slowing pace, and covered him with a sheet. His body temperature was too high for a blanket, and BJ was worried by the sweat beading his forehead. He waited by Hawkeye’s bedside for a few more minutes, waiting for him to settle further into sleep. When his breathing evened out and the tension faded from his face, BJ felt safe in leaving him for the night, and left quietly, switching off the lamp as he went.

     As he left, his foot caught on the lamp and sent it crashing to the floor. BJ cursed himself and turned to see Hawkeye sitting up in bed, bleary eyed and blinking.

     “BJ?” he said, grinding the heel of his palm into one tired eye.

     “Are you awake?” asked BJ, more hopefully this time.

     “Wha - yeah,” said Hawkeye, then his face paled, and he dropped his hand. “Again?”

     Setting the lamp back on the bedside table, BJ sat down again on the chair he had positioned close to the bed and flipped on the light. Hawkeye squinted and looked down at his lap while his eyes adjusted. “Yeah, again,” said BJ, not bothering to hide the exhaustion in his voice. “I’m sorry, Hawk.”

     “You’re sorry?” said Hawkeye, and looked up at him, eyes watering in the sudden glare of the lamp. “You’re sorry? I’m making your life a waking hell and you’re apologizing to me?”

     “It’s not like that,” said BJ, resting his head in his hands. He wanted to reassure him, tell him it would be alright, but with his own sanity falling apart by the moment, he couldn’t find it within himself to draw upon the hopeful energy he often used when talking to his patients.

     “Dammit, I just - I’m so sorry, Beej. I’m so goddamn sorry. This isn’t good for you, it’s not good for your family.”

     “To hell with what’s good for me,” said BJ, anger breaking through his exhaustion. “I know what’s good for my family better than you do. They’re taken care of.”

     Hawkeye shook his head. “No, I already pulled you away from work for a week, the kids are gone at their grandparent’s, and Peg’s probably been up for hours. Look, this isn’t good, I can’t keep doing this and mucking up your life.”

     “Listen, I’m more than capable of taking care of them and you,” said BJ, scowling. “I don’t need you telling me how to run my house!”

     “I never meant -”

     “We’re doing fine. I’m doing fine. You’re the one who needs help right now.”

     Hawkeye looked taken aback, and glanced away towards the wall, untrimmed, graying hair falling over his eyes. “I - I’m sorry, Beej. Really.”

     “No - damn. I shouldn’t have yelled,” said BJ, and sighed. Through the window, he could see the pale, sick light of early dawn beginning to shine through the trees.

     Following his gaze, Hawkeye viewed the dawn with a look of utter defeat. Shoulders slumped, hands loose and damp with sweat, he looked down at his lap and said, so quietly BJ could barely hear him, “I think I should go back to Maine.”

     “You can’t,” BJ blurted, “I need you here.”

     A look passed between them, disbelieving on both ends, before Hawkeye shook his head, frowning. “Why would you need me?”

     Shocked into speaking by his own confession, BJ said, “Because I don’t want to be alone with myself.” Hawkeye stayed quiet, waiting for his friend to speak. “I - something happened at the hospital today. I wasn’t prepared. I’ve been working there for five years now, I’d been doing just fine, but something happened today that just… I can’t explain it. I don’t know what to call it - some kind of breakdown. Some kid asked for my CO, and I just lost it.” He clenched his fists, a nervous sweat springing up on the back of his neck.

     “Why did he ask for your CO?” asked Hawkeye, frowning.

     “He was panicking. He was a veteran, he had a Navy tattoo on his arm. I guess he thought he was back in a war zone, or something,” said BJ, and realized with alarm that he was beginning to tear up. “Stupid, right? The war’s been over five years! He’s had time to - to cope, to figure things out. There’s no reason he should’ve freaked out the way he did. It was just senseless.”

     “BJ.”

     “I lost it,” choked BJ, “I completely, utterly lost it. I thought I was right back in Korea, I could hear the shelling right over my shoulder. The whole time, I was praying for Colonel Potter to step in for me, praying to God that you’d step away from your case to take over, but it was just me, all alone in the middle of a group of people, and I - I’ve never felt so scared in my life. I’ve been trying to leave that damn place behind for the last five years, but it just keeps coming back. I can’t leave. I’m so sick to death of feeling like this.” Finally, finally, he allowed himself to bend under the pressure, and folded forward, anchored by Hawkeye’s warm hand on his back as he allowed himself to cry. The force with which his emotions took him nearly threw him, a mountain of guilt, strain, and fatigue threatening to crush him under its weight.

     Almost relieved to have someone depend on him, Hawkeye soothed him in a quiet voice, knowing the words didn’t matter as much as the tone, and waited for the storm to pass. When it did, he waited for BJ to sit up and dry his eyes, somewhat sheepish, and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve been feeling this way?”

     “Not a great topic of conversation for the current situation,” said BJ with a halfhearted shrug. “You had your own problems to deal with.”

     “No, I mean, at all, ever. You didn’t think you could go to me for help?”

     He shook his head. “I was too caught up in getting my life back. I just wanted to leave everything behind, even if that meant my friends too. You were right, when we said goodbye in Korea. If I had my way, I never would’ve spoken to anyone from the MASH again. But then Radar came, and so did you, and all the work I put into boxing everything up just fell away. And now Peg and the kids are going to pay for it.”

     The blankets rustled as Hawkeye turned in bed to face him, squeezing his shoulder. “You’re a good man. I’ve seen your family, they’re happy and healthy and rosy-cheeked. You’re not burdening them.”

     “Not yet,” BJ said bleakly. “But at the rate things are going?”

     “Then we’ll both go up to Sacramento,” said Hawkeye, a firm resolve in his own voice that both surprised and reassured him. He had missed feeling this sure about anything. “We’ll both see a specialist, and if you end up in the loony bin too, at least I’ll have someone to play checkers with.”

     The statement did nothing to cheer him up, but BJ forced a grim smile onto his face anyway. “Right. That’ll be our version of a retirement home.”

     Hawkeye let out an unexpected laugh, and while it was not as raucous or uncontrollable as most of his laughter was, it was still genuine. “I missed laughing,” he chuckled, “Haven’t done that in a while.”

     “It shows, you’re rusty.” BJ suppressed a yawn and turned off the lamp, no longer needed with the first rays of dawn peeking through the trees. “You want to try for some sleep?”

     Hawkeye nodded and settled back into bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. “Call me crazy, but any chance for sleep is one I plan to take.” He paused, and gave BJ a solemn look. “What about you?”

     “I think I’ll read,” he replied, and stood, stretching out his sore muscles. “I can never sleep unless it’s dark, anyway. Sleep well.”

     “I’ll make a valiant effort, but no promises.”

     As BJ closed the door behind him, feeling sucker-punched by the night’s events, and vaguely queasy from a full night without sleep, he noticed the door to his bedroom, still open an inch. Peg had left it open for him, not knowing he wouldn’t be back. He closed it without a sound and headed off down the hallway, taking a moment to look into his children’s empty rooms. They’d only been gone for a day, but he missed knowing they were in the house. He couldn’t let the situation with Hawkeye continue to escalate and keep them out of the house.

     Back in the living room, he viewed his tepid glass of scotch and abandoned medical journals with distaste. Nothing about those dry articles could hold his interest now, but he knew that going back to bed would be an exercise in futility. Resigning himself to boredom, he went to the kitchen to make some toast and watch the sunrise.

     The kitchen clock said six on the dot by the time he sat down with a small breakfast, and six thirty by the time he finished it. There was nothing to do but wash dishes and sweep an already spotless floor, and every time he tried to sit down with a book, the words couldn’t seem to register in his mind, and he found himself reading the same sentence over and over again.

     By the time he was eyeing Peg’s sewing basket with not even a hint of irony, the kitchen phone began to ring. Before its third ring, he had it off the hook and up to his ear, glancing towards the hallway to try and judge whether it had woken anyone up.

     “Hunnicutts,” he said in a terse tone. Who would be calling the house at eight in the morning? It was too early for telemarketers, and none of Peg’s friends could be calling at that hour.

     “Good morning,” said a familiar, friendly tone. “This is Sherman Potter. I hope I haven’t caught you too early in the morning, I’m afraid I’m not sure whether you’re two hours ahead or behind me.” There was a gruff, apologetic chuckle at the end of the sentence.

     “Potter?” gasped BJ, “Is - is that really you?”

     “It really is. How are you, son? Did I wake you or the missus up?” BJ pulled a chair over to the phone nook and collapsed into it, almost giddy with relief.

     “No, I’ve been up for hours,” he said, massaging away some of the aches accumulating around his temples. “It’s about seven o’clock here.”

     “Oh,” said Potter, sounding rueful. “I figured you were two hours ahead of me; it’s around nine here.”

     “Well, like I said, I was already awake, so it’s not a problem.” He paused, frowning. “Is everything okay over by you?”

     There was a careful, even tilt in Potter’s tone, one that BJ was already familiar with; it was the bedside manner of speaking. “Everything’s fine; Mildred’s healthier than my horse, and I haven’t felt more relaxed in years. No, I figured I’d call you and see how the homestead was doing.”

     BJ could hear how careful the old man was being with his words, and almost resented it, but he responded calmly all the same. “Peg’s looking more beautiful by the day, and the kids are doing their part to tear the house down, one board at a time. We’re all very happy over here.”

     “Who couldn’t be in such a lovely climate?” Potter replied. “I got a letter from Hawkeye a few weeks ago that said he was moving in with you; is he with you yet?”

     So Potter was one of the people Hawkeye was writing to. BJ wondered who else Hawkeye was keeping in contact with, and how many of those people were from the MASH. At the same time, he felt a terrible guilt. He had never even considered sending Potter a postcard, let alone keeping up a correspondence. “He got here about a week ago,” he said.

     “Well, hopefully he’ll get my letter soon; I sent it to the Maine address by mistake. Those folks at the post office will have a hell of a time figuring out where to send it.” There was another chuckle. “So, how’s the boy doing? Things haven’t been too easy for him lately, judging by his last letter.”

     “It’s been hard for both of us,” BJ admitted. Why did it seem so much easier to talk to Potter than Thur? He felt no hesitance in pouring out his worries. “He’s been having these terrible nightmares, and I just don’t know what to do for him. We’ve tried different pills, tranquilizers, bedtime routines, but nothing seems to help. I know it’s early in the game, but I feel like I can’t help him at all.”

     The other man hemmed, considering it. “Seems like Pierce has always been finicky about his sleep,” he said. “What kind of nightmares are they? Maybe they could be solved with some therapy, like what Freedman used to do for him back in the day.”

     Back in the day, thought BJ with a shudder. “They’re not normal nightmares,” he said, crooking one leg over his knee. “I don’t know what to call them. For one thing, I can’t wake him up from them - I can’t even tell when he’s awake or when he’s asleep. He’ll get up in the middle of the night, moving around and talking, yelling sometimes, and if I try to snap him out of it, it just gets worse.”

     “I’ve had a few kids come through with that,” said Potter thoughtfully. “Scares their mothers half to death. But I’ve never seen adult do that; most kids grow out of it by the time they turn ten. Not that it couldn’t happen.”

     “What do you do to treat it?”

     “Can’t do much about it,” said Potter, and BJ wilted at the shrug in his voice. “Comfort them when they cry, don’t try to shake them awake, and hope it goes away eventually. Most kids don’t remember it in the morning, how about Pierce?”

     “Nothing,” said BJ, shaking his head. “The first time I woke him up out of it, he forgot his own name and where he was for about a half hour. Scared the hell out of both of us. He wakes up in the morning not remembering any of it. Sometimes he has normal nightmares, and he remembers those, but nothing else.”

     “What kind of nightmares?”

     “Korea,” he said frankly, not wanting to go into details. “Sometimes it’s just… the war, you know, bombs and surgery. A few times it was us getting hurt. I don’t know how to help him with those.”

     “Maybe some psychiatry could help with both of these problems,” suggested Potter. “I remember Freedman helping with his nightmares before.”

     Now it was BJ’s turn to shrug. “I’ve thought of that too; suggested it to him, too. What happened in those last few weeks before we went home… he doesn’t want to get within ten miles of a psychiatrist. He’d rather deal with it with medication, or on his own.”

     There was a tut of disapproval from Potter. “Psychiatry may not be his cup of tea, but it sounds like you’ve been trying everything you can over there. It just might be what works for him.”

     “I don’t know,” said BJ, feeling a bit of irritation on Hawkeye’s behalf. “I can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of the practice myself. Seems a bit unreliable.”

     “I’m sure you aren’t,” said Potter to placate him. “But there isn’t a lot of treatment for veterans right now, and psychiatry is his best bet, in my humble, experienced opinion. Not everything can be solved with the old ‘take two and call me in the morning’ routine. You remember those kids that came in with battle fatigue.”

     “He doesn’t have _battle fatigue_ ,” scoffed BJ, “Not after five years of civilian life.”

     “I didn’t say that he did,” said Potter with annoyance. “But you can surely admit that the war did leave him worse for wear. It happens to everyone who’s been in a combat zone - yourself included.”

     He let out a tense, jittery laugh. “Oh, come on. I’m - I’m not like him.”

     “Didn’t say you were,’ Potter replied. “But the war affects us all in different ways.”

     Now uncomfortable and feeling put on the spot, BJ hunched over in his chair, avoiding a gaze he couldn’t see. “Well then I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.”

     “You’re telling me that you’re not feeling any leftover tension from your time at the MASH?” asked Potter, and by his tone, BJ could tell that he knew what he was feeling inside. He didn’t know how, but somehow, from hundreds of miles away, Potter had figured out the turmoil in his head, and was working to unknot it.

     “How did you know to call?” asked BJ, his exhaustion stripping away all the pretenses he set up. There was no point in trying to hide anymore. “Today of all days?”

     “Well,” said Potter, sounding surprised. “I didn’t know I was being that obvious about it.”

     “About what, though?” BJ rubbed his tired eyes, feeling sick of being confused and unhappy. “I didn’t even know you had this number. I don’t understand.”

     Potter took a moment to consider his words before replying, and BJ sat listening to the soft crackle of static on the phone line. “Your chief of surgery, Jonathan Thur, called me yesterday and told me that I should consider dropping you a line. We’re old friends, me and him; happened to serve together in Guam.”

     The kitchen seemed unnecessarily quiet. BJ was sure he could hear his heart drop. “Is that all he said?”

     “No, son,” said Potter, and left it at that.

     BJ could feel the shame bubbling up, the guilt and anger that had been building for months, years after he came home from Korea. It pricked at his conscious, nagged at his gut, making him want to scream or run out, whichever seemed more convenient at the time. “I hate myself,” he said to Potter, to the kitchen, to himself.

     “For what happened during surgery?” asked Potter. His voice was so calm, so sympathetic.

     “For everything,” said BJ, his voice strangled and rough. “All those so-called tough choices I made during surgery. Bringing this home to Peg. All that time I spent wallowing in booze, not facing up to myself. I’m letting them down, goddammit. I’m letting Hawk turn into a nutcase, I’m neglecting my kids, my wife. She - she doesn’t smile like she used to.”

     “Hunnicutt,” said Potter.

     “She sent the kids away to be at their grandma’s,” he said, and he wasn’t sure whether he was feeling anger or sadness, or just guilt. “Hawkeye’s keeping them up at night, screaming about the war, calling for Trapper, and I can’t help him. I’ll have to drop him off at some psych ward if this keeps up. And once he’s gone, what about me? I keep having days where I don’t want to leave my room, where I don’t want to come home from the office. I sleep too much, or not enough, I drink at night when Peg’s not awake to see it. I - I can’t - I can’t -”

     “You’re putting too much pressure on yourself, son,” Potter said kindly. “You can’t put this kind of strain on your shoulders and expect to hold up.”

     “Shit, I -” BJ broke off and let out a sob into one elbow, then straightened up, wiping his face. “I’m sorry.”

     “No need to apologize,” said Potter. “I take it you haven’t talked to anyone about this?”

     “No one,” he said, feeling that shortness of breath once again.

     There was a burst of static on the other end of the line, then clarity. “I’m lucky to be old,” said Potter. “I’ve got friends I’ve known longer than you’ve been alive, and we’ve all been through the same bull. We can talk to each other, call each other up when the nights get long and the bottles get empty. You boys don’t have those kinds of connections, so it’s up to some paid doctor to sit down and provide that kind of support. Then he writes you a prescription, and you never see him again.” He broke off and sighed. “I wish there was something more we could do, some sort of system in place for this sort of thing. It sure ain’t fixing itself on its own. Hunnicutt, I know you and Pierce aren’t keen on psychiatry -”

     “No,” BJ choked out. “Not after what Hawkeye went through at that - that prison.”

     “I wasn’t suggesting that. No, what I want is for you and Pierce to be there for each other,” said Potter, surprising BJ into a sort of precarious calm. “Talk to each other. Don’t close each other off. Pierce has had no choice but to be open with you; he can’t stop himself from talking in his sleep. It’s up to you to be open with him.”

     Regaining some of his breath, BJ realized he had the phone cord in a stranglehold. Releasing it, he said, “I just don’t want him to feel burdened. I don’t want to burden anybody… I shouldn’t be feeling this way at all.”

     “You can’t control how you feel,” said Potter. “There’s no shame in that. You were in a combat zone, same as all those other boys. I wouldn’t believe you if you told me you were fine after seeing the things you saw. Just because you’re seeing the guts on an operating table instead of in a foxhole, doesn’t mean they weren’t guts.”

     BJ swallowed thickly and nodded, even though he knew Potter couldn’t see it. “You’re right,” he whispered. “I - me and Hawkeye, we’ve got to be there for each other. We all do.”

     “Now you’re getting this.”

     “Oh, God, why didn’t I ever write to anyone?” BJ asked himself, “Why did I let Radar move out? I should’ve sent Margaret a letter the first day I got home, what was I thinking?”

     “Radar?” demanded Potter, a sudden urgency in his voice. “The boy’s been staying with you?”

     “You didn’t know?”

     There was an angry exhalation on the other end of the line. “He stopped writing me about a year ago. I was worried, but the letters had been getting few and far between, so I figured his life had just been getting busy. You said he moved out?”

     “Yes, without much of an explanation,” said BJ, now worried. “Listen, will you call him? I have his new number right next to me.”

     “You boys,” grumbled Potter, but BJ could still hear the fear in his tone. “Alright, I’ve got pen and paper handy. I’ll call him right after this. Listen, I want to hear back from you soon, you hear?”

     “I hear you,” said BJ, and rattled off the phone number taped up next to the phone. Down the hall, he could hear the faucet running as either Peg or Hawkeye got up to start their day. “I have to go, the rest of the house is waking up. But I’ll call you back later, don’t worry.”

     “I’ll worry anyway,” said Potter gruffly. “It’s my job.”

     “I know,” said BJ. “And I won’t forget about what you said.”

     “Good. Goodbye for now, son. Be well.”

     “Goodbye, sir,” said BJ, and didn’t even hear the formal ‘sir’, the word that had become so ingrained in him that it rolled off the tongue as easily as a nickname. There was a short click as the line went dead, and as he hung up the phone, BJ wished that the conversation could have continued longer.

     There was an odd feeling in his chest, a prickly feeling of both relief and distress. He held one hand to his heart, feeling the rapid beat that had been worrying him for a long time, feeling feverish heat from his skin. He let out a long breath, trying to steady himself, and looked up at Radar’s phone number, hastily scribbled on a long piece of notepad paper that Peg used for her grocery lists. A fork slid from its place on the drying rack and clattered onto the floor, startling him. He stared at it for a long minute, then stood and replaced it. The day stretched out in front of him, long and daunting, and he ran a hand over his face, feeling the stubble.

     Whoever was in the bathroom left and moved to a different room, and he turned to go into the hall, anticipating a shave and a hot shower to match. Perhaps the steam could clear his head.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After being given the solutions to deal with his isolation and guilt, BJ is too afraid of burdening Hawkeye to put them into practice, and it may take a second intervention from Colonel Potter for him to make any real progress. Meanwhile, Hawkeye struggles to cope with the death of his father, which he feels is his own fault. Day drinking together when Peg isn’t home may feel good in the moment, but it’s up to the two of them to find a real way to deal with their miseries.

The Hunnicutt household, at least when BJ first got back home, was always loud. Erin was a popular girl at school, and often had her friends over to play and run around in the backyard, her smile even brighter now that her daddy was home. And when Ben was born, a colicky baby with no hair and a restless spirit, the house felt a bit smaller and louder, but good. There was usually something playing on their little blue radio that sat next to the apple bowl, something from Harry Belafonte or Chuck Berry. At home, there were things to keep him busy; cooking dinner with Peg, keeping up the lawn and shrubs, repairs to be made inside the house, and the thousands of little tasks that he used to think about getting done while trying to sleep through a bombing, or during long OR sessions. **  
**

     And for a few days, he was free to do those things. There were long, leisurely days when he was free to do nothing but nap, read, walk around outside without fear of getting shot at, take his daughter to the park, drive out to the beach with his wife. But then his time was up, and he had to return to work in order to keep his job, kindly reserved for him by the US Army after it had torn him away from it. There were patients to see, new assignments, a hurried discussion about his residency, and an abrupt shift from general surgery to the intensive care unit, likely influenced by his service in Korea.

     So he agreed to the reassignment, got used to waking up at four in the morning, and tried to get rid of his old, hopeful thoughts about basic surgery and taking out appendixes. Erin went back to school in the fall, Peg found out she was pregnant, and he did his best to absorb himself back into his old life, ignoring the letters in his mailbox postmarked from Maine, Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio. One came by from Massachusetts, a thick envelope with neat, but floral handwriting, and that went into the trash with all the rest. A letter from an army base in Colorado nearly gave him pause, and was set aside on his desk for a few days before being shoved into a drawer and forgotten.

     He stopped going to movies, tired of gunshots and recruitment advertisements, abandoned the newspaper in favor of a book, and gave blank stares to any relative or friend who asked him about Korea. He bought his own liquor, afraid of Peg’s reaction to how quickly he was going through his stash. The radio, which interrupted the music periodically with news bulletins about the aftermath of Korea and rising tensions in the East, was mostly silent. The house began to grow quiet and not quite cold, but not as warm and comfortable as it had been when Erin was first born.

     The children got older, Ben began to crawl and then toddle, Erin was learning multiplication from Peg and doing book reports on Tom Sawyer, and BJ still felt like he was readjusting. The letters died down for the most part, and a few still came once a year, usually around Christmas. Peg would bring them to his office after finding them abandoned, leave them in a neat little stack, and after finding them unopened, would send the writer the family Christmas portrait along with a short note. She never mentioned it to him or nagged him about writing back, but the presence of the stack still ate at him.

     Unbeknownst to him, Peg had kept up a correspondence with Radar ever since they met at the airport, and in the winter of 1956, she sat him down in the living room and asked him to consider allowing Radar to live with them. His mother had died, she told him, there was nothing left for him at the farm, and he seemed terribly lonely. She asked him to call and propose it as a short visit, nothing more, and if Radar accepted the invitation to stay, then all the better. BJ, perhaps driven on by the guilt of abandoning Radar and the rest of his friends, agreed all too quickly, and less than a month later, Radar was living with them in a spare room.

     Radar was good to have around the house. He was quiet, polite, and good with the children. He quickly found work again, poured himself into his responsibilities, and didn’t question BJ about the letters. BJ worried sometimes about how silent he was, about the blank look in his eyes when no one was around to catch his attention, but there was never enough there for him to say anything about it. Soon, Radar’s presence in the home became the norm rather than another cruel reminder of the war, and BJ settled into his routine again.

     Things changed again two years later, when the letters from Hawkeye resumed. First it was two or three a month, then once a week, then twice a week, and finally, a letter marked express. All of these went unopened, and sat in a pile on BJ’s desk. He kept them there as a way to assuage his guilt, trying to believe that he would eventually open them and answer, knowing full well that something must be happening in Maine that he needed to know about. But a month went by, the letters gathered dust and wrinkles, and finally, the mailbox was full of nothing but bills and magazines.

     A week after the letters stopped, BJ received a telegram.

_“Dad’s dead STOP Need to hear from you STOP Please call STOP Hawkeye.”_

     Peg was home when it arrived, and brought it to him as soon as he walked through the door. “If you ignore this one, I’ll never forgive you,” she said, and pressed it into his hand. “I left his phone number next to the telephone.”

     Stuffed into the telephone nook were piles of Hawkeye’s letters, each one opened by Peg and pored through to find his telephone number. On top of them all was a scrap of the paper she used for grocery lists, his number jotted down in a shaky hand. BJ sat down in a chair left near the phone, misdialed the first time with a trembling finger, and called. No one picked up, and he kept redialing, skimming through the opened letters as the phone rang. Each one was shorter than the last, less eloquent, more and more desperate, until the one stamped express, which contained Hawkeye’s phone number and nothing else.

     Finally, Hawkeye picked up, and he was as drunk as BJ had ever heard him. “Pierce residence,” he said, and it took three tries for him to get the words right.

     “Hawk,” was all BJ could say, in a hoarse whisper that he wasn’t even sure Hawkeye heard, but a moment later, he could hear him sobbing on the other end.

     The conversation took hours, and seemed to consist of only a few words. Hawkeye spoke in jumbled snippets, his voice choked with grief, unable to get more than a few words in without breaking down all over again. It was a stroke, BJ finally learned, sudden and unexpected. Hawkeye wasn’t home at the time, he was in town on a house call. If he had been home, Daniel Pierce may have been saved, but no one could say for sure.

     “It wasn’t your fault, Hawk,” said BJ, hoping Hawkeye could understand him in his drunken state. “You were doing your job. Nobody could have prevented this.”

     “I could’ve,” said Hawkeye with a hysteric laugh. “Everyone keeps telling me that it - it wasn’t my fault, it’s all I hear. Shit, I - I should’ve been there. I got called out because some teenager had the flu. I should’ve been there. I could’ve saved him.”

     It was hard to argue with Hawkeye, the man who ran himself ragged taking dozens of chest cases, the man who was convinced he was the only hope of a tiny town in Maine, who fell asleep on gurneys and tabletops because he didn’t know when or how to stop. The best BJ could do, miles away and incapable of any sort of real help, was listen as Hawkeye ranted, the mixture of desperation and relief in his voice a clear indication of the isolation he had been experiencing. He had a lot to say, not all of it understandable or even coherent, but BJ listened, and offered support where he could.

     When the words began to die away, and Hawkeye finally seemed to be bottoming out, BJ chose to broach the subject of a common theme he was seeing in Hawkeye’s letters, now scattered across the kitchen floor and wedged into the phone nook. “Are you still sleepwalking?” he asked, massaging a crick in his neck.

     “If that’s what it is,” said Hawkeye. He sounded as exhausted as BJ felt, but the alcohol was giving him a manic energy that didn’t fit with the tired rasp in his voice. “I keep waking up in the middle of my yard, digging through my cupboards. Thinking about staying with someone in town just to stop myself from walking into the ocean at night.”

     “Do you have anyone you can stay with?”

     Hawkeye let out a harsh laugh. “You mean someone who I haven’t managed to insult, scream at, or alienate in the last few months? S-someone who doesn’t think I’m a pathetic, bughouse lunatic? Who doesn’t think I’m losing it?”

     “A relative, maybe?”

     There was a long pause, and at first BJ thought he had insulted him, but a clink and a cough told him that it was just a drinking break. “Everyone on my mom’s side is in Kentucky, and I don’t know them. My dad’s side scattered over the last twenty years; everyone’s all over the map.”

     BJ looked over at Peg, who had come in a few minutes ago to sit and repair a broken strap on her shoe. She looked up at him, raised her eyebrows, and nodded, giving him her implicit approval. She didn’t know what Hawkeye needed, but she knew that BJ knew what he needed.

     “Hawk, why don’t you come stay with us for a while?” he asked.

     It took some convincing for Hawkeye to leave Maine, but he was too far gone in his grief and misery to push away the idea for long. After a short, half-hearted argument, Hawkeye finally agreed to come to California for at least a week, and even wrote it down at BJ’s request so he wouldn’t forget the next morning. They made plans to talk the next day and finalize arrangements when Hawkeye was more lucid, which Hawkeye found funny in a way that made BJ wince.

     The call ended, and BJ felt empty listening to the silence on the other end of the line. He looked at Peg, who met his gaze, searching his face for answers.

     “I think he’ll be here in about a week,” he said, and kneeling down, began to gather up Hawkeye’s letters. He retreated to his office without another word, clutching an armful of papers and ripped envelopes, and settled in to read.

     And when Hawkeye did arrive, worn out, rail-thin, and gray haired, BJ saw the same look in his eyes that he had seen when Trapper left, when Radar turned up in pre-op with a shoulder wound, when he returned from his stay in the psych ward with Sidney. That look was the look of Korea, and he knew as soon as he saw it that he would have the same look soon enough.

                                                      ***

     Sometime around ten in the morning, BJ ended up dropping off on the couch, wrecked from the events of last night. There was a lot on his mind; his sudden honesty with Hawkeye and the phone call from Potter, but none of it was enough to break through his fatigue. He slept straight through lunch and woke up when the mail truck pulled up to the curb.

     He sat up, rubbing his face, and startled when Hawkeye raced past him to the kitchen, wrapped up in his robe. The back door slammed twice, and Hawkeye returned with a handful of letters, which he sifted through at the counter. After sorting them through twice, he dropped the stack into the mail organizer hanging on the wall, looking disappointed.

     “Potter sent the last letter to the Maine address,” said BJ from the couch.

     Hawkeye turned, surprised to see him awake. “How’d you know I was looking for a letter from Potter?”

     “I got a call from him this morning,” said BJ, yawning. “He forgot you were coming out here and put down the wrong address by mistake.”

     Tightening the cord on his robe, Hawkeye strode over to the couch and dropped down on a chair nearby. “And let me guess, he grilled you about what’s going on with me?”

     “Well, yes,” he admitted, “But he had some questions for me too.”

     It took Hawkeye a moment to register what BJ had said, the events of last night blurry and almost forgotten in his mind. “What about?” he asked, trying to gauge BJ’s mood.

     BJ sighed. He had promised Potter that he would talk with Hawkeye and discuss both of their mental health, but that promise seemed foolish now with Hawkeye sitting across from him. “Just about me and the family,” he answered, only somewhat truthfully. “We haven’t spoken in a while and he was wondering how everything was going.”

     “Well, nice to know that I’m not the only one you don’t write to,” said Hawkeye. The barb was ill-timed, and he seemed to regret it immediately. “And what did you tell him? ‘Peg and the kids are at grandma’s, Hawkeye is losing it, and I’m not doing much better’?”

     “You’re not losing it,” said BJ to the carpet, then looked up. “Wait, Peg’s with her mother?”

     “She left before lunch,” said Hawkeye, who was poking through the stack of books on the side table. “She said she’d be back after dinner, she’s just going to see the kids and help Erin with her math homework.”

     “Her mother’s going to think we’re getting a divorce,” said BJ, running a hand through his hair. At the rate he was going, he was going to end up as gray as Hawkeye before long.

     “Come on, you know that’s not true,” said Hawkeye, “You and Peg have a great marriage, everyone knows that.”

     “Everyone, really?” BJ stood from the couch, swaying a little as his tired muscles adjusted to the sudden movement. It was time to do something. He didn’t intend to go another day with his wife and children feeling like they couldn’t live in their own house. “I’m going to go get dressed. You should too.”

     Hawkeye dropped the pen he was fiddling with. “Why?” he asked, sounding a little fearful of whatever BJ was about to suggest.

     “We’re going to Sears to get you some clothes,” he said. “Everything you came here with is too big or full of holes, and I want you to have something to wear when we go to up to Sacramento.”

     Hawkeye unconsciously pressed one hand to the lapels of his robe with an alarmed expression. “My clothes are fine, BJ. They fit me fine.”

     “Hawkeye, the few things you did bring have worn out knees, holes in the sleeves, or they’re just plain too big,” said BJ, looking at the ragged cuffs of Hawkeye’s robe. “I don’t know how, but you managed to lose even more weight than last I saw you. A psychiatrist is going to take one look at you and think you’ve given up on life. Not only that, but you ruined your one pair of shoes with trudging around the garden.”

     “So I’m not a fashion plate,” he protested, “That doesn’t mean you’re going to drag me to the store and make me get a back to school outfit!”

     Ignoring Hawkeye’s objections, BJ walked into the hall and headed to his room to get dressed. “Go get dressed, Hawk,” he said as he shut the door behind him.

     Five minutes later, he came back out, this time dressed and with his hair combed, to find Hawkeye still in the living room wearing his robe. “I figure you can do this without me if I just give you my size, right?” he asked.

     “Look, this is as much about getting you out of the house as anything else,” said BJ. “You haven’t been farther than the mailbox in over a week. At the very least, just drive with me. You can wait in the car if you want.”

     “Fine!” grumbled Hawkeye, and removed his robe, revealing the same crumpled outfit from the last few days. He caught BJ’s incredulous stare and shrugged. “This is probably the cleanest thing I have right now. If you want, I can find you something in a mustard stain.”

     “We’re going to do some laundry when we get home,” said BJ, trying not to be overtly disgusted. If he was honest with himself, he knew there were days when he had time off and the only things that seemed comfortable were a stretched out sweater and an old pair of pajama pants. He was in no position to judge, but the state of Hawkeye’s clothes, stained and creased with old sweat, still made him shudder. Probably because it reminded him too much of Hawkeye sitting down to eat in the mess tent or falling into bed, still dressed in his bloodstained scrubs.

     The car, a jalopy that BJ had bought just as he finished med school, was with Peg, so they ended up taking the bus. He felt almost lucky that Peg had taken the car, wary of the probing silence a car ride alone with Hawkeye could bring. The people around them filled the air with their chatter, doing away with the need for stilted small talk between them. Hawkeye sat with his knees propped up against the back of the next seat, his dark circles all the more prominent in the shadowy interior of the bus. He caught BJ looking at him a few times, worry etched on his face, and grinned as if to say, ‘sure you are, but what am I?’.

     When they arrived at the department stores, squashed together and broken up by small insurance offices, their departure from the bus was accompanied by a flock of college girls. Hawkeye said nothing and stood aside to let them off first without even a flirtatious smile or a wink. It was odd to BJ to see him like this, so quiet and subdued, but it was even stranger to be out in public with him. Aside from the fact that he hadn’t seen the man in five years, BJ had realized as soon as he got home that firstly, the army, and Hawkeye, had changed the way he interacted with his friends, and secondly, that Hawkeye had quickly become his best and only friend. Nobody he knew at home was as close with him before or after he left for Korea, and certainly none of his male friends were sharing his clothes, falling asleep on his shoulder, or offering him a friendly dance in the officer’s club. It was strange to suddenly feel so distant from other people; even Peg wasn’t as touchy as Hawkeye could be sometimes.

     Walking alongside him on the sidewalks, BJ fell right back into the habit of walking close together, bumping shoulders and nudging his friend’s arm to point out things in shop windows. But it wasn’t the same in the states; people passing by gave them funny looks, and BJ found himself putting some distance between them. Hawkeye didn’t seem to notice, being mostly wrapped up in staring at the sidewalk and hunching his shoulders against the people pushing by and brushing up against them.

     “I forgot it was Saturday,” BJ said as an apology. “I should’ve remembered, everyone and their dog will be out shopping today.”

     “Maybe we could call it a day?” suggested Hawkeye, hopping out of the way of a woman and her stroller. “Not to waste your bus fare or anything, but I get the feeling this trip might have been a bad idea.”

     “It’s not that bad, Hawk. It’s still early afternoon, the real crowds won’t be in until the teenagers roll out of bed and hit the town.”

     Hawkeye shrugged, looking distinctly miserable. “I’m from a small town. Seeing two of my neighbors having a mailbox conversation would constitute a crowd for me.”

     BJ apologized again and chose not to mention that Hawkeye had previously lived in Boston before the war, and by his own accounts, had been quite the party animal. If a post-lunch shopping crowd could rattle him, then he needed to be treated with more care than he thought.

     Once they were inside the store, however, it was better. The fluorescents cast a clean, sterile light over everything, the shoppers were quiet and focused on their own tasks, and best of all, the men’s clothing section was almost deserted. Anticipating noncompliance, BJ led Hawkeye over to a rack of sweaters and began to pick out some things for him, aware of the encroaching winter and the sharp shoulder blades beginning to poke through the back of Hawkeye’s shirts. Once he had piled a large enough heap of clothes into his arms, he directed Hawkeye towards the fitting rooms and wandered over to the socks. If Hawkeye’s socks were anything like the rest of his clothes, he’d need a new set altogether - or maybe five.

     “Still a fan of argyle, I see,” said Hawkeye. BJ turned, ready to ask if he had even tried on any of the clothes - he’d only been gone for less than a minute - and nearly dropped his armful of socks.

     Hawkeye was wearing a mischievous smirk and a baby blue sweater with a ship in a bottle design woven into it; a design bright enough to be a painting, and big enough to frame. “I think I’ll get this one,” he said, glancing down at the garish array of colors splashed across his midsection. “Reminds me of home.”

     “Where did you find that?” asked BJ, half amused, half horrified. “Is there some sort of reject bin around here where little old ladies throw their failed projects?”

     “Close,” said Hawkeye, struggling to remove the sweater. Even with how thin he was, it was a little tight on him, and the fact that he was wearing it over his shirt and cardigan didn’t help. “There’s a bargain rack next to the fitting rooms. I’m pretty sure this is from the junior’s section, actually.”

     “Are we actually buying this?”

     “ _I’m_  actually buying this,” said Hawkeye with a smug expression. “I’m not exactly a hobo. So I’ll be getting this along with your other very sensible, drab choices. But uh, we’re not getting pants today. I’ve got a belt at home that I can poke a few more holes in.”

     Shaking his head, BJ added the socks to Hawkeye’s bundle of clothes. “If you insist.”

     Hawkeye paid for his clothes with a handful of crumpled bills - his wallet was at home, probably under a pile of unwashed clothes - and soon enough, they were back on the bus to home, a considerably less crowded trip. Set at ease by the mostly empty bus and the knowledge that the outing would be over soon, Hawkeye seemed more animated and willing to talk, pointing out stores as they passed and narrating the lives of people passing on the sidewalk. BJ listened in silence, nodding and smiling occasionally, just happy to hear a normal conversation from him for once. However, even Hawkeye’s chatter wasn’t enough to take his mind off his troubles; Potter’s phone call was always at the forefront of his mind, even when faced with Hawkeye in a garish sweater from the boy’s section, and so was the growing conviction that perhaps it would be better not to mention it at all. In the cold light of day, the idea of dragging Hawkeye down with his own difficulties seemed more and more repugnant. Why should he have support? He wasn’t a soldier, or even a battalion aid surgeon. Just a doctor from California, struggling along through surgery with only a few years of residency behind him, trying not to puke during amputations.

     A pain his arm distracted him; Hawkeye had poked him in the shoulder. “Are you even listening to me? I’m providing very entertaining commentary, and you don’t even have the decency to take notes.”

     “Sorry,” he said with a smile he didn’t quite feel. “Left my stenographer at home.”

     “A pity for me,” said Hawkeye, winking. He glanced out the window again, then back at BJ, growing serious again. “Maybe it’s just that rotten night’s sleep, or lack thereof, but you look like something’s been eating at you all morning. Wanna tell me about it?”

     He shrugged. “Nothing. Just tired, like you said.”

     “You think I’m gonna believe that, after that bomb you dropped on me last night?” Hawkeye had the decency to lower his voice, but BJ found himself looking nervously over his shoulder at the other passengers, all the same.

     “You don’t mince your words, do you?” he demanded, also sinking into a whisper.

     “Well, why should I start now?” Underneath that snark was a real note of worry that BJ couldn’t fail to miss, and he hated that it was coming from a person who looked so tired and sick.

     “Listen, just worry about yourself right now,” he told him, praying he would drop it before other people started to notice their conversation.

     Hawkeye leaned closer, perhaps hoping to create an artificial sense of privacy. “Is it something to do with that phone call from Potter this morning? I heard you from the hall, you know, or at least your tone. You didn’t sound too happy.”

     “My chief of surgery called him about yesterday,” he said shortly, glaring at the filthy floor between his feet. “They happened to know each other in World War Two, and I happened to let slip that Potter was my CO. It’s all just one big happy coincidence.”

     There was a long pause as Hawkeye looked down at his knees, clearly angry with himself. “Beej, I’m sorry,” he said finally, “I didn’t know.”

     “Well, now the whole bus knows,” muttered BJ, glancing around. Sure enough, two or three pairs of eyes looked away from them and back towards their newspapers or out the window.

     “We’ll talk when we get home,” said Hawkeye, and BJ was too embarrassed and upset to argue with him. The rest of the trip passed in silence, and Hawkeye nearly leaped over BJ’s knees to get out when the bus reached their stop. BJ followed, head down, and dragged his feet all the way to the house, feeling ridiculous and put upon.

     By the time he reached the front walk, Hawkeye was waiting for him, leaning against the wooden gate that Erin had scratched her name into a few years ago. “What did he say that upset you so much?” he asked, doing away any form of pretense.

     He wanted to argue, to claim he wasn’t upset, but the way Hawkeye was looking at him, he knew that faking it was useless. Better to just dole out small, strategic doses of truth instead of trying to do away with it entirely. “He suggested psychiatry for both of us,” said BJ in as casual a tone as he could manage. “I said no way in hell.”

     “You don’t think it could help you?” asked Hawkeye, surprising him.

     “Who cares?” asked BJ, opening the gate and sliding through past him. “I don’t need psychiatry. I don’t know how you feel about it, but it’s not for me.”

     “And that’s what upset you?”

     “I’m not upset.”

     Hawkeye snorted and let the gate slammed closed, following a few feet behind. “You look like you’re developing an ulcer. Come on, talk to me.”

     “Hawk, there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. It was getting hard to keep an even tone. “In fact, if you want to talk about anything, talk about how bad you need a shower. Your hair is starting to stand up on its own.” Without waiting for a reply, he unlocked the front door and slipped inside, hoping Peg would be home so he could have an excuse to avoid this conversation.

     “BJ, please,” said Hawkeye, almost begging at this point. He left the paper bag of clothes on the floor next to the door and followed BJ from the living room into the kitchen, where the lights were still off, and it was evident that neither Peg nor the children were home yet. “You were honest with me last night, can’t you do the same now? Or do I have to get you drunk first?”

     “Sure, since I’m just looking for an excuse at this point,” he replied, sinking down at the kitchen table. The dark humor was unlike him, but he was past caring. He just wanted to be alone.

     “No, really, BJ,” said Hawkeye, and sat down at the table with him, folding his hands on the tablecloth. “I feel like I know you pretty well by this point, even if we did take a five year break. What’s on your mind?”

     He looked up, finally meeting Hawkeye’s pleading stare, and smiled. “My family. Always, my family.” It was an honest answer. No matter what was on his mind, they were too.

     “I should’ve guessed.”

     Just then, the phone rang, shattering the silence that was beginning to build a wall between them. BJ answered before the first ring had time to die away, praying that it wasn’t Potter again, calling to ask why he hadn’t talked to Hawkeye, why he had broken his promise. A sweet, familiar voice on the other end of the line cleared away all of his anxiety at once, and immediately piled it right back on.

     “I think I’m going to stay here tonight,” said Peg, and he knew by her tone that she was trying not to alarm him, but there was no way the words couldn’t have wounded him. “And it’s not anything to do with you, I want you to know that.” There was a pause between her words that let him know exactly what she was waiting for; a plan, a solution for Hawkeye, and even better, a solution for him. She wasn’t oblivious to his state, and he knew that. They both knew that.

     “I know it’s not,” he said, leaning against the wall. “They need their sleep, and so do you. I’m planning on taking Hawk up to Sacramento tomorrow, and we’ll try to get this sorted out. Are you sure this isn’t any trouble for your mother?”

     “No more trouble than it is for us,” she said, and the slight barb made his gut twist.

     “I love you, alright?” he said, passing a hand over his face. “Kiss Erin and Ben for me. And tell them I’m sorry.”

     “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she murmured, and he knew that she was cupping her hand around the phone the way she did when she didn’t want to be overheard, always courteous of the friend she was speaking with and listening to, always ready with good advice and a kind word. “You’re doing a good thing for your friend, and that’s nothing to apologize for. If everything goes well in Sacramento, I’ll bring the children home tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll figure things out from there.”  
      
     “Okay,” he said with a glance towards Hawkeye, who was studying the tablecloth with unusual intensity. “I’ll call and let you know how things are tomorrow.”

     “Alright. I love you, BJ.”

     “I love you too,” he said, and listened to the line go dead, swallowing against the lump in his throat. He turned around and faced Hawkeye, phone in hand, and smiled without any humor in the expression. “She’s staying at her mother’s tonight.”

     “Yeah?” said Hawkeye, raising a cautious eyebrow.

     “Yeah,” said BJ, and clunked the phone back into its cradle. “Wanna get drunk?”

     Unbidden, a grin stole across Hawkeye’s face, and he sat back in his chair, looking almost gleeful. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “The prohibition on this house has been dreadful for my nerves.”

     “It’s called living with small children,” said BJ, but he was too distracted by the thought of the scotch and gin hiding in a cabinet above the stove to give too much thought into defending his position.

     Hawkeye was already digging in the cabinets for a glass, and settled on a mug for himself and a punch glass for BJ. “Listen, I haven’t been drunk in over a week and a half,” he said, blowing some dust out of the punch glass. “Now that may seem like an easy feat, but I’m determined to set my liver adrift without a life raft if it kills me, and it just may.”

     “Well, I haven’t been properly drunk since Korea,” said BJ, bringing down the scotch and gin, noting with displeasure how much of the scotch Hawkeye had managed to pilfer. “Didn’t realize how much I liked it until I got back. Didn’t know how much I’d miss it, either.”

     The sound of alcohol falling into a glass was a sound that made both of them breathe a sigh of relief, and Hawkeye watched with interest as the level of scotch grew in his mug. “Are we going to pretend to ask about water or soda?”

     “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said BJ, and poured himself an amount that would make anyone else blanch but Hawkeye. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking this stuff. This is my secret stash, too.”

     “Funny, you don’t hide it very well,” he said, and took a sip as he sat back down at the table. “Huh. It’s not as good now that I’m not sneaking around.”

     Looking down at his punch glass, BJ felt a faint twinge of guilt, but a draft of scotch quickly washed that away. “Listen, if I hide it well, then that means I have something to hide. I’m perfectly content to keep it above the stove and pretend that it’s just there for company.”

     “And I thought you said you haven’t been drunk since Korea?” asked Hawkeye with a sly wink. It was amazing how much more easily the word rolled off his tongue.

     “Properly drunk,” he corrected. “It’s been a long time since I’ve fallen over in a ditch; or into Margaret’s arms, for that matter,” he added, as the memory of meeting Frank and Margaret for the first time suddenly leapt to mind.

     “Well if you’re rusty, I can get you some training wheels,” said Hawkeye, and tossed back the other half of his scotch. “Refill, bartender.”

     BJ tsk’ed as he caught the mug being slid across the table to him, and topped up the small remainder of scotch in Hawkeye’s glass with gin. “It’s my scotch, I get the last of it.”

     “You’re a cruel man, but fair,” said Hawkeye, and accepted the mug as it was shoved across the table to him, slopping liquor over the edge as he caught it. “What’s for dinner, by the way? Or will it be liquid?”

     “Maraschino cherries and martini onions,” he answered, and looked up at the clock next to the fridge. It was only half past five, as good a time as any to have a happy hour. Still, it would be better to draw the curtains soon. No need to develop a reputation among the neighbors as a lush when his wife was away.

     As soon as those little lace curtains were drawn, he knew he was devoting himself to this drinking session with complete fervor. Hawkeye needed absolutely no encouragement, and happily drank his way to the bottom of his mug time and time again, requiring no entertainment, no talking, no pretense of a friendly get together accompanied by drinks. He knew just as well as BJ that they were getting drunk for a reason, in order to forget, remember, or just plain exist without any of the pressure of sobriety. The scotch ran out first, and they wore away at the gin as best they could, coughing between drinks and making useless little comments about the quality of the liquor. There were no fond remembrances of times gone by, no humorous stories or tall tales, and best of all, no talking about the war.

     Instead, Hawkeye talked about his father, about Crabapple Cove, old friends from his town that stopped talking to him when he came back home, changed and gray. He talked about his first time going into hysterics in a grocery store, about his first surgery after coming home to his practice in Boston, about going home, disgraced, to his father, and begging for a position as a surgical assistant. There were angry tears in his eyes as he remembered being recognized in a liquor store by an old teacher after being confronted by the owner for trying to buy booze while drunk, and an apologetic smile as he recounted the angry speech that followed.

     Meanwhile, BJ listened, mostly in silence, choosing to focus on his growing high instead. Any other time, or perhaps only five years ago, he would’ve joined Hawkeye in talking about his troubles, but not now. He listened to Hawkeye’s impotent rage, and began to forget how many drinks they’d had since they sat down. It began to get dark outside, and he sipped his drink more slowly, hoping to make it last, to draw it out, and at the same time, banish his memories. In truth, he would have preferred Hawkeye to be silent, but he knew that Hawkeye needed to rant as much as he needed to brood. Maybe it was for the best that Peg was staying at her mother’s; he never would have been able to do this without her absence.

     At some point, the phone rang again, and he ignored it for a solid minute. If it was Peg, she’d hear the alcohol in his voice, and he couldn’t face that. If it was anyone else, then it didn’t matter what they had to say. Let it ring.

     “Answer the damn thing, BJ,” said Hawkeye, scowling at the phone. “It’s giving me a head start on my hangover.”

     “Answer it yourself,” he replied, absorbed with spinning his wedding ring on the table. “I’m busy.”

     “Piss off,” Hawkeye grunted, standing anyway, and made his unsteady way to the phone nook. He glared at the phone, seemingly stymied for a moment, and then picked it up. “Hello, you’ve reached the house of depravity and shitty gin, this is Shirley Temple speaking.”

     “Goddammit Hawkeye,” said BJ, but he was too far gone to care or snatch the phone away. “And which one of Peg’s friends is that?”

     “Potter?” exclaimed Hawkeye. BJ turned in his seat to squint at him, halfway between disbelief and alarm. “No, I’m not drunk, just my voice is. What?”

     “What does he want?”

     Hawkeye waved him off. “Uh, no, he’s home. Well I’m a grown man, I don’t need a permission slip from him to get drunk. Actually, he’s drunk too. Looks like a giraffe on roller skates.”

     “Jesus, Hawk, give me the phone,” he demanded, holding out a hand. Hawkeye huffed and handed him the phone, then wandered over to the stove to try and find something new to drink. BJ watched him dig through the cupboard, then turned back to the phone and tried to muster up an ounce of sobriety to get him through the call. “Hello?”

     “Hunnicutt, what the hell is going on over there?” barked Potter, outraged. “Is your wife home for this?”

     “No, no,” assured BJ, and wordlessly pointed Hawkeye towards a cabinet under the sink, mouthing the word ‘brandy’. “She’s at her mother’s tonight, because my marriage, according to Hawkeye, is going wonderfully right now.”

     “Well, maybe that’s for the best,” mused Potter. His voice seemed tinnier and farther away than that morning, but BJ decided that was probably the alcohol providing an interesting filter. “I was calling to see if you might feel up to a visit; I had a chat with Radar on the phone this morning that didn’t put me too well at ease, and to tell you the truth, neither did our conversation this morning.”

     There was a clatter as Hawkeye managed to unearth a yet unopened bottle of brandy from under a pile of cleaning supplies, and he held it up to BJ with an incredulous look on his face. BJ shrugged.

     “BJ?”

     “Sorry, got distracted,” said BJ, turning back to the phone as Hawkeye poured himself a glass of brandy to go with his mug of tepid gin. “Listen, I’m up to a visit, but I’d rather not bother Peg with anything else right now. If you came out tonight and left before she got back tomorrow, I’d be all for it, but it’s a little late for you to catch a plane.”

     “He wants to visit?” asked Hawkeye, looking up from his drink. “Send him to Radar’s place if you have to, I want to see him!”

     “Was that Hawkeye, I just heard?”

     “Yes,” said BJ, “And he wants to see you, too. Listen, if you could’ve gotten a flight out here tonight, then yes, we’d love to have you. But I just - I just can’t bother Peg with this, not with everything that’s happening. I’m sorry.”

     Hawkeye gaped at him, and seemed on the verge of protesting, when Potter said, “No need to apologize. I’m in San Francisco right now. Just figured I’d call ahead and make sure I didn’t show up without permission.”

     BJ blinked. “Uh - well I - do you need a ride here?”

     “No need,” said Potter, and suddenly the poor quality of the call made sense - he was calling from a pay phone in the San Francisco International Airport, the same one Hawkeye had arrived in. “I can get there by bus in under an hour. Don’t worry about making up a bed for me, I’ll find myself a hotel room once I arrive.”

     “Okay then,” said BJ, wide eyed, too blindsided to say much else.

     “Until then,” said Potter, “Goodbye, son.”

     “Goodbye,” answered BJ, and set the phone on the table rather than putting it back in its cradle. He looked at Hawkeye, who was lolling in his seat, but wearing a smile nonetheless.

     “Guess you should start making coffee,” suggested Hawkeye. “I don’t think I could sit up straight if I tried. Maybe an adrenaline shot would be better.”

     “Yeah, coffee,” said BJ, looking down at the phone. He had only an hour to sober up and figure out a way to explain why he hadn’t kept his promise to Potter. There were bigger things to worry about than coffee. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Potter has flown out all the way from Missouri to check on BJ and Hawkeye, cutting their ill advised drinking session short. For Hawkeye, it seems like not a moment has passed between their parting in Korea, but for BJ, the tension lays heavily on him. Soon enough, Hawkeye leaves for another restless night of sleep, leaving BJ alone to try and understand his actions. Potter is a good listening ear, but usually that means someone needs to be talking.

The hour spent waiting for Potter’s arrival was stressful, to say the very least. Hawkeye shuffled off to his room to find something clean to wear, leaving BJ to make coffee and try to clean up the evidence of their drinking session. His head was spinning like a top, and he nearly broke the carafe when he slammed it too hard into the coffee maker. The empty bottles, normally disposed of carefully and quietly, went into the trash with a crash and an unfortunate crunching sound. He looked at the bottle of brandy, freshly opened and scarcely touched, and tucked it back under the kitchen sink for later, ignoring the stab of shame it brought him. 

If he had known that he’d develop a drinking habit, and then, possibly, a drinking problem, at the tender age of twenty-nine years old, he would have laughed. Now, at the thirty-four, he was far past amusement. In part, he blamed Hawkeye, and maybe even Trapper for putting the idea into his head to build that still in the first place, but it was easier to blame the war. 

Perhaps guessing his thoughts, Hawkeye sat down beside him, holding a glass of cold water. “You know, there’s probably a bored housewife down the road that drinks more than we do,” he said, taking a sip before passing the glass to BJ. 

“Then we should probably head on over and make a housecall,” he said. “Ah, hell. I think I forgot to put grounds in the coffee maker.”

“I’ll do it,” said Hawkeye, and clattered around for a few minutes, hunting for the yellow canister of coffee grounds and managing to knock just about everything off the counter in the process. “You know, this is a valiant effort, but I don’t think we’re going to get sober by the time Potter gets here.”

BJ pointed him in the direction of the canister, which was behind the apple bowl, where Peg always put it. “The point isn’t to get sober,” he said, watching while Hawkeye struggled to pour the grounds into the coffee maker without spilling it everywhere. “The point is to sit up straight without falling over.”

The coffee maker stuttered to life with an earthy growl, and after a moment of gurgling, the first drops of coffee began to fall into the waiting carafe. Entranced, Hawkeye watched it drip for a moment before returning to the table, rubbing his eyes as he sat down. 

“Amazingly, all I want to do right now is sleep,” he said, barely concealing a wide yawn behind his hand. “Is that bad? I’ll just be up again in an hour, anyway. Booze doesn’t seem to keep me down anymore.”

“Did it used to?”  
Preoccupied with a previously unnoticed stain on his shirt, Hawkeye shrugged. “It did at first. If you get blackout drunk, then you can’t dream, and if you can’t dream, then you certainly can’t go wandering around the house. But I think I accidentally built up my tolerance. Besides, if I got that drunk every night, I’d kill myself before long.”

BJ only nodded. His head was swimming, and his hands, folded on the tabletop in front of him, kept going in and out of focus. He was positive that he had drunk more than Hawkeye, who was loose limbed and pleasantly snookered, but by no means at the stage of bitter, angry drunkenness that had become their norm all too many times in the past. BJ, however, was absolutely at that point, and he wanted nothing more than to tip over the table and stomp out of the house instead of trying to sober up. 

“What’s the point?” he demanded, completely unaware that his train of thought had become verbal. Hawkeye raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, I just - nothing. It’s stupid. It’s just stupid.”

“What’s stupid?”

“This!” he exclaimed, gesturing to the coffee pot, the empty, rinsed glasses in the sink, and the trash can full of broken glass. “Why the hell are we getting sober? When are we going to get this chance again?”

A worried frown crossed Hawkeye’s face, breaking through his artificial good mood. “What, the chance to get drunk? I dunno, Beej. Does it matter that much?”

“I didn’t ask Potter to come here,” he complained, “And I certainly didn’t ask him to call.”

“Well, you didn’t have to say yes to the visit.”

One of their waiting coffee mugs lost a portion of its handle as BJ swept it onto the floor in a sudden burst of energy. Hawkeye flinched as the chip of pewter went spinning away and disappeared under the store, but said nothing, mouth pressed in a flat line.

“I just want to know, what the hell was the point of going home if Korea’s just going to end up at my house, anyway?” said BJ, and even as he said it, he hated himself for it, as he hated himself for practically everything. He knew he was saying something terribly, horribly stupid, but he couldn’t stop himself. “First Radar, then you, and now I’ve got my CO on his way, and for what? What could possibly be so attractive about California, aside from how expensive everything is? What do you all want from me?”

“We missed you,” said Hawkeye, staring at the dark strip of space between the stove and the floor. “Is that a foreign concept?”

“No you didn’t,” he said, standing, and made his way over to the cabinet for another mug. Breaking the first one had sapped him, and there wasn’t much left behind but resentment and brutal honesty. “You needed me, both of you. Because your lives were falling apart. And who better than me to put you back together again?”

Too shocked to put a coherent sentence together, Hawkeye merely shook his head at him.

“Oh, sorry, am I wrong?” he questioned, turning to face Hawkeye again, arms folded. “Is there something I’m missing here? Was I not your primary caretaker for all the time we spent in that hellhole? Or have I just imagined the dynamic of our entire relationship?”

_ “Dynamic?”  _ said Hawkeye, “What  _ dynamic?  _ We were constantly picking each other up off the floor, what of it?”

“You tended to fall down a lot more than me.”

There was a harsh squeal of rough wood on linoleum as Hawkeye shoved his chair back and stood. He was incapable of leaving, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get farther away. He crossed to the counter and began cleaning up the dishes on the drying rack, at least to give himself something to do. “You know, you can be a real pit sometimes,” he said as he began to stack plates. “Is it my fault you were more mentally sound? Is it my fault you didn’t go crazy?”

“With you around, I couldn’t afford to go crazy,” muttered BJ. He was in a foul mood, the type of which Hawkeye hadn’t seen in a long time, and had hoped not to see again. “I had to take care of you. You were constantly spinning out of control and you needed someone to wind you down, and that someone ended up being me.”

Something inside the cupboard rattled as Hawkeye slammed the cabinet door shut on the clean, stacked dishes. “Well, maybe you didn’t get sent to the laughing academy because I was just better at keeping you together.” He turned to face BJ, leaning against the counter with his chin stuck out and his arms crossed, daring him to try and dispute the statement. He did.

“Yeah? Did you major in psychiatry in between breakdowns?” 

“Fuck you,” Hawkeye said calmly. “BJ, did you forget who stopped you from going AWOL? Who held you while you cried because your wife had to get a job? Hell, who stopped you from wrecking your marriage because you got guilty over that nurse? Do I have to stand here and pull up a receipt for every single one of our freak-outs?”

BJ froze where he was by the stove, aware that he had not only crossed a line, but completely obliterated it. “Hawk, I -”

“Forget it.”

“No, really, I -”

“No, BJ, forget it,” said Hawkeye, and went back to his chair at the table; standing suddenly seemed exhausting. “We’re both big, drunk idiots. I barely know what I’m talking about, I doubt you do either.”

BJ nodded, staring at a scuff in the linoleum. “I really am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Yeah, but you meant it, didn’t you?” asked Hawkeye, also avoiding eye contact. “You really feel like I’m a burden.”

“No I don’t,” he said, trying to rally, but it was hard to think of the right words. “You’re not. I don’t know why I said that to you.”

“Because it’s true,” sighed Hawkeye. “I’m not an idiot. I know how bad I was cracking up towards the end. You’re right, you were forced to take care of me. And I… I let the ball drop.”

There was so little he could say in response to that. They both had their private grievances, not all of them related to each other, and there was so much to be said to fill in that five year gap between them. But with alcohol on the brain, and Potter arriving any minute, there wasn’t much that could be said. Finally, he offered, “You didn’t let the ball drop. You’re not responsible for me.”

“Then why do you act like you were responsible for me?” asked Hawkeye. He looked utterly miserable, like BJ’s sudden contrition had taken the fight out of him. “Like you still are? I thought I was just going to have a depressing phone call with you, and now I’m suddenly at your house. Do I really come off as that helpless?”

“Not helpless, just…” BJ trailed off. The word he was thinking of was ‘needy’, but there was no way in hell he was going to say that to Hawkeye. Finally, he said, “I think it was just easier to take care of you than it was to take care of myself.”

“So you let yourself get bitter about it instead of owning up to that?”  

BJ grimaced. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Is that why you abandoned all of us?”

He glanced up, mouth open, and met Hawkeye’s angry, tear-filled gaze. The topic of abandonment was always an issue with him, after the sudden departure of Trapper and BJ’s own, truncated trip home. His insistence on a proper goodbye had been a clear indicator of how deep that hurt ran, coupled with the fact that he still called out for Trapper in his sleep. He wanted to protest, to insist that he was only trying to do what was best for himself, but he knew the words wouldn’t hold water. Not when he was placed on a forced break from his work, not when his old CO was flying out to see him all the way from Missouri, and not when he had just admitted to Hawkeye the previous night that he, for some unidentifiable reason, needed Hawkeye to be there with him. At the very least, to keep him from being alone with himself and his thoughts. 

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered, unable to justify himself. “I just wanted to go home and stay home. I didn’t want to go back to Korea every time I opened a letter, or answered the phone.”

An abrupt, unexpected laugh from Hawkeye rang out through the kitchen. “Then why’d you name your son Benjamin?” he asked with a humorless smile. “Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical?”

BJ blinked. “It was Peg’s idea, not mine.”

That only seemed to amuse Hawkeye more. “You mean - you mean she named her kid after someone she’d never met?” he said between laughs, “Or worse, someone that she’s met through your letters? Dear Peg, Hawkeye, also known as Benjamin, is currently bent over an oil drum, puking his guts out after an all nighter. Dear Peg, a nurse has sprained Hawkeye’s wrist for trying to snap her brastrap. Dear Peg, don’t you think Hawkeye, who is at this moment stuck in the basketball hoop after an ill advised bet with Klinger, would be a good namesake for our future son? Cordially yours, an idiot.”

He shrugged. “Look, she honestly didn’t know. I don’t think I ever mentioned your birth name to her. BJ is just a name that runs in the family, and we wanted Ben to have a real name instead of an acronym.”

Hawkeye’s mouth dropped open, and he held the position for a moment before lapsing back into helpless, hysterical giggles. “And to think I was flattered!” he cried, throwing his head back. “Confused, bewildered, curious, but flattered! And here I find out was all a fluke? Beej, I’m almost disappointed!”

It had always amazed BJ how Hawkeye could turn on a dime like that, flipping between grief and hilarity like radio stations without a moment’s notice. On one hand, he was relieved that the tension was gone, or at least momentarily hidden from sight, but on the other, nothing could change what he had said. An idiotic, stupid thing to say, born out of drunken hostility and a desire to place the blame for his behavior on anyone but himself. He would have to apologize for it again when he was properly sober, he reflected, staring at his hands, but curiously, he felt strangely relieved to have said it. 

BJ looked up, startled out of his reverie by a sudden silence. Hawkeye was staring at him, a smile playing around his mouth that could have been mocking, sympathetic, or neither.

“Look at us, huh?” he said, chin in hand. “What happened?”

The question could have applied to anything; BJ went with the safest, easiest answer. “Guess we left our brains in our helmets.”

Hawkeye exhaled, glancing up at the ceiling like it could provide answers. “I knew this visit wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs,” he mused, “But I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Neither of us were,” said BJ, retaking his place at the table. He couldn’t add anything to that, and neither could Hawkeye, so they sat quietly, listening to the coffee maker percolate, until the doorbell rang. 

“I’ll get it,” said Hawkeye, nearly leaping out of his chair. BJ nodded and let him run to the front door on his own, none too eager to greet Potter in his current state. He was aware the bags under his eyes, the tired, waxy pallor to his skin, and the broken blood vessels in his eyes. His only comfort was that Hawkeye looked worse. At the front door, he could hear Hawkeye and Potter greeting each other; Hawkeye’s nearly manic laughter and rambling little jokes, coupled with Potter’s quiet, but cheerful replies. 

A wave of giddy, nervous nausea rolled through him, and he pressed a hand to his stomach. What had he been expecting? A rubber wagon? Trying his best to shake off his apprehension, BJ rose from his chair just as Potter and Hawkeye reentered the kitchen, fixing a smile on his face that he hoped looked halfway passable.

“BJ, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine,” announced Hawkeye, presenting Potter to him like a prom date. “Sherman Potter, man of a thousand colloquialisms. You’ll get along great, but you’ll have to duck when you waltz.”

“It’s nice to see you again,” said BJ, wincing at the stiff, generic greeting. Drawing on his last reserves of enthusiasm, he tried again. “It’s been so long, I don’t even know what to call you. I’m pretty sure ‘sir’ probably isn’t the right title at this point.”

“Just Sherm is fine,” said Potter, shrugging off his gray, almost alien-looking civilian jacket. “Potter, if you’re feeling shy.”

“Right,” said BJ, and made the decision to try and avoid seeing him long enough to have to make that choice. He felt far too large and awkward for his kitchen; Hawkeye was already behind him, pouring cups of coffee, and Potter was seated at the table, leaving BJ to stand and try not to sweat.

“You look like you’re about to have a baby,” muttered Hawkeye in his ear as he breezed past with the coffee, looking animated and far too at ease with the situation.

Ignoring the comment, BJ joined them both at the table, folding his hands tightly and out of sight by his knees. His gaze immediately turned to Hawkeye, hoping that the man’s loose tongue wouldn’t fail him now. Hawkeye, of course, didn’t disappoint.

“How was your flight?” asked Hawkeye, continuing without waiting for a response, as always. “They call California the land of sunshine, but the end of my flight was like riding a tin can through a hurricane. The fact that there was no air in the cabin didn’t help matters much, of course, and the stewardess was completely unsympathetic, especially when I tried to hide under her skirt!”

“My flight was fine,” Potter cut in, somewhere between annoyance and amusement. “Whole thing went off without a hitch, I’m happy to say - Mildred was convinced that a night flight was a recipe for disaster.”

“Well sure, you can’t put headlights on a plane,” said Hawkeye. “You’d give some poor goose on his way home from Alaska a heart attack.”

There was a short, almost unnoticeable pause as he waited for BJ to pick up the slack, to complete his half of the rapport. But when BJ failed to speak up, Hawkeye carried on without him.

“Just picture it, you’re some poor shmuck driving through Canada, you hear a thunk on your windshield, and now you have to defibrillate a goose on the side of the road.” Hawkeye grinned and rapped his knuckles on the table. “Sherman, I’m glad you’re here to witness this rambling in person, but I have to admit, the change from paper to person is quite the switch.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Potter, looking both of them up and down. “Mighty strange to see you boys again in the flesh, too.”

“Although we’ve lost a bit of our boyish charm,” said Hawkeye, running a hand through his hair. BJ wondered why he had gotten so self conscious about it; the state of his prematurely graying hair had never seemed to concern him so much until now. But then, not a lot of time to primp in a warzone.

“Not me,” Potter said with a grin. “Being back home has added a decade back onto my life. I’ve got the joints of a young man again.”

“Ah, to be a young man in Missouri,” said Hawkeye, as if speaking to a reporter. “Where every day you wake up to fresh air, singing birds -”

“And a cow pie on your front porch,” Potter interjected. Hawkeye threw back his head and laughed; it sounded almost natural. “Well, BJ, you’ve been quiet over there. How are things with you and the family?”

He glanced up from scrutinizing a threadbare patch in the tablecloth. “Good. It’s nice to be back with them.”

“I’m sure,” said Potter, and waited for BJ to go on. Under normal circumstances, nothing could have stopped him from gushing about his family; Peg’s new hobbies, what the kids were learning in school, the rollerskates Erin was learning to use, but he didn’t feel particularly forthcoming. When no further response came, Potter continued, “Well, I can’t tell you how good it is to be home with Mildred after all this time. She’s a damn fine woman for waiting this long for me.”

“Is she still in her jam business?” asked Hawkeye, reminding BJ once again that he was really an outsider in this conversation. “Those jars of rhubarb you sent me for Christmas were gone within a month, I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t get my fix.”

“I’ll see that you get a fresh batch,” Potter reassured him, “Something in blueberry, this time; she made over fifty jars of the stuff and we’ve run out of people to give them to.”

The conversation went on in this manner for a few hours; Hawkeye rambling, Potter filling in the gaps where he paused to take a breath, and BJ speaking only when he needed to. Some part of him was relieved that there was, as yet, no pressure from the man to talk about anything serious, but he knew that a more serious discussion had to take place at some point. There was nothing to do but wait until that moment came, and worry quietly in the meanwhile. Hawkeye seemed perfectly content to ignore why Potter was there in the first place, chattering about whatever came into his head, and seeming oh-so at ease that BJ was almost resentful of him. 

At around the same time he was considering leaving the room, at least for the sake of some peace and quiet, Potter held up a hand and stopped Hawkeye’s latest tangent in its tracks. “Hold on, Hawkeye. Is that clock behind you right?”

He leaned back in his chair and squinted at the clock for a moment. “Yeah, it’s ten-thirty, why?”

“Has BJ got you on any nighttime medication?”

“Yeah, a barbiturate,” said Hawkeye, looking almost embarrassed by the question. Which again, BJ wondered why. Hawkeye had never been one for embarrassment or shyness. “Again, I ask, why?”

“I’d like you to take it,” said Potter in a tone that was familiar to them both; a tone that brooked no arguing. “If you’re going to get any sleep, you need a routine. Start with a consistent bedtime.”

“You’re sending me to bed at ten-thirty?” he demanded, “What am I, ten? I haven't been to bed at ten-thirty since -”

“Cool your jets,” said Potter, fixing Hawkeye with a commanding look. “If you want your body to let you sleep, you have to teach it when to expect to sleep. Now get going before I tuck you in myself.”

“You really know how to motivate a guy, don’t you?” quipped Hawkeye, and stood to stretch, wincing as one shoulder audibly popped. “Alright kids, I’m off to bed. I’ll be back in an hour for a glass of warm milk and a bedtime story.”

“Best bed down for the night, Hawkeye,” Potter advised, pouring the rest of Hawkeye’s coffee into his own mug. “Don’t give yourself anymore reason to be restless than you already have.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. My brain’s got enough topspin as it is.” With a bow, he left his mug in the sink and headed for the dark hallway, swaying almost imperceptibly as he went. 

“Goodnight, son,” Potter called after him. Hawkeye responded with a playful wave and vanished down the hallway, accompanied by a muffled thud as he bumped against a wall on the way to his room. Potter chuckled. “Well, he was doing a pretty good job faking it until he stood up.”

BJ nodded and stared at the brown bubbles floating in his coffee, trying to decide how soon he could go to bed without appearing suspicious. 

“You can’t be doing much better, judging by all the noise you’re making over there.”

He glanced up, meeting Potter’s gaze for the first time that evening. He’d been contenting himself by focusing on the buttons on his shirt, or his own hands, and the shock of looking into the old man’s eyes again after half a decade of repression was enough to momentarily drive the air out of his lungs. 

“Are you alright?” asked Potter, and despite his gentle tone, the words still felt like a punch. 

“How am I supposed to answer that?” BJ whispered. He couldn’t stand the sound of his own voice. 

“With as much honesty as you can muster.”

He shook his head, one hand gripping the edge of the table, out of sight under the edge of the tablecloth. “I feel like a damn fool. A drunk, damn fool.” Potter only nodded, and BJ felt pressed to continue. “You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have left your home and your wife just to come out here and make sure I’m okay. I feel like an ass just for making you worry at all. I was tired and upset and if I’d had my head on straight, I never would’ve said anything.”

The words hung heavily in the air and dropped without a sound. Finally, Potter stood and headed to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, retrieving the bottle of brandy BJ had so carefully hidden away. He poured a finger’s worth into an empty glass taken from the drying rack, and brought it back to the table with him, leaving the bottle by the sink. 

“How’d you know?” asked BJ, eyes fixed on the liquor the man was so casually swirling in his glass. 

Potter raised an eyebrow. “You couldn’t have seen it with your eyes on your knees, but Hawkeye would make a good hunting dog in another life. Follow his eyes, and you’ll find the booze. I have a sense he was just hitting his stride when I cut you off.” 

In the fading glow of his intoxication, BJ could only feel shame. He said nothing and watched Potter take a tentative sip of the brandy, thinking of how badly he missed being able to drink without reproach from anyone. He doubted he was an alcoholic, but there was no denying how tightly he had been tied to that particular bedpost in Korea. Everything tied back to Korea, it seemed. At least everything significant that he could bear to make himself think of. 

“You know, BJ, I’m not just here for you,” said Potter, startling him out of his thoughts. “I’ve got two other people here that need my attention, and we’re short on time if you want me gone before the missus comes home. Now I can’t help Hawkeye overnight, but I can get an idea of his condition, and I can talk to you to try and relieve some of that pressure you’ve been feeling. Are you willing to continue our conversation from this morning?”

“What exactly is there to talk about?” demanded BJ, and drank back half of his coffee in a sudden movement. The mug clinked against his bottom row of teeth and he set it aside, wiping his mouth. “I’m no different than anyone else coming home, and in a lot of ways, I’m better off. I don’t need psychiatry - or - or medication, or extra help.”

“And I never said you did.”

“Oh.” Bj looked down at the tablecloth again, brow furrowed. All the nuances of conversation seemed to be rapidly slipping through his fingers. He knew he shouldn’t be reacting so harshly to someone who only wanted to help, but he felt painfully inadequate and burdensome. The whole evening had been one long mood swing. “I’m sorry,” he offered at last, “For adding onto your worries.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, son,” said Potter. It was amazing how comforting it was to hear those words, and BJ couldn’t decide if it was the source or the words themselves that had calmed his nervous heartbeat. “I consider you boys part of my family. You’re not a burden.”

“Are you sure about that?” He said with a laugh and a wry smile, like Hawkeye would. Hawkeye was the master of spinning tense conversations into jokes, but he had never quite picked up the knack. The question itself barely qualified as rhetorical; there was too much of a tremor in his voice, and he felt pathetic as soon as it came out of his mouth, but he desperately needed to hear the answer.

“You’re not.” Potter gave him a firm nod. “In fact, you’re the one shouldering the load, what with taking care of Hawkeye and Radar, not to mention your own family. I’m amazed that you’re holding up this well.”

The sudden praise hit him with unexpected force, and he found himself blinking in silent surprise for a moment before he managed to say, “Thank you. That - I needed to hear that.”

“We all need to hear that, whether we realize it or not.” Potter finished off his brandy and refreshed his glass, eyeing BJ over the rim as he raised it to his mouth. “Have you given any thought to what I said about confiding in Hawkeye? Have you discussed it with him?”

Biting the inside of his cheek, BJ shook his head. “I can’t pile that extra responsibility on him. It’s not fair, not with what he’s going through.”

“It wasn’t fair to him when you cut yourself off from him for five years, either,” he pointed out, and BJ shrunk even further into himself. “I understand why you did it; hell, I’ve been guilty of the same thing. But you can’t start talking about fair now.”

“Then wouldn’t it make more sense not to cause him anymore anxiety now? After what I did?”

Potter tilted his head, weighing his words carefully. “BJ, I could tell from my conversations with Hawkeye that he missed you very much. He wasn’t lonely at home, but you were his best friend during a very difficult time. He’s happy to see you again, no matter the circumstances, and he’s never expressed an ounce of bitterness to me.”

BJ looked at Hawkeye’s paper shopping bag of clothes, still by the door where he’d dropped it that afternoon. The blue sleeve of the ridiculous sweater with the ship in a bottle design poked over the side. “I promised we’d see each other, you know. After we got home.”

“Did you?”

“I wasn’t lying at the time. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know  _ what’s _ happening. When Radar got here, it was awkward at first, but I got used to it. Now Hawkeye’s here and I’m falling apart. Why?”

The look Potter gave him seemed almost frustrated, but his voice was nothing but calm. “Son, why did you choose not to keep in contact with anyone once you got back home?”

Caught off guard, BJ was shocked into answering honestly. “Because I wanted everything to go back to normal.”

“And now Hawkeye’s here, and things aren’t normal. So you tell me; why is having him here so upsetting to you?”

“Because he’s reminding me of what I tried to forget.” He blinked as the world suddenly settled back into focus. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Potter agreed, and got up to switch off the coffee maker. “Well, does that put things in perspective?”

“A little, I guess,” said BJ, trying hard to process what he’d said. Had he just admitted that Hawkeye was a negative impact on his life? “But I still don’t understand - it wasn’t like that with Radar. I mean, sure, it was strange to have him around the house at first, but it didn’t make things any better or worse. Ever since Hawkeye got here, I feel like everything is spiraling out of control, and I have no way of stopping it.”

There was a brief pause as Potter rinsed out the carafe and placed it on the drying rack next to the stack of dishes Hawkeye had abandoned there. “It could be things are different because Radar was never there during those tough times when Hawkeye was. Hawkeye’s been with you through thick and thin, most of it thick. That could have something to do with it.”

“So you're saying he has a more… negative effect because of what we've been through together?”

“It's just a thought.” Potter returned to the table and sat down with a sigh. “But what really matters is what you think about the situation.”

“I think I want to go to bed.” It was a cop out, and they both knew it.

The disappointment was clear on Potter’s face, but he nodded anyway. “Alright, son. We can talk more in the morning, if you’re feeling up to it.”

BJ stood a little too hastily, making a new scuff in the linoleum as his chair skidded backwards. “Right. Of course. Do you need a - we have an empty room you can sleep in, I just need to get some extra blankets out of the -”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Potter, stopping him in his tracks. “I booked myself a room for the night, but I have a feeling I’ll be needed here tonight. It’s about time you got a good night’s sleep.”

“Thank you, I appreciate it,” he said, so relieved he was almost guilty. “Just be careful in there, there might still be some broken glass on the floor.”

“Of course.” Potter stood and patted him on the shoulder on his way out of the kitchen. “Goodnight, lad. Try to catch up on some of that lost sleep.”

He sat down again and listened as BJ drifted off down the hall; more surefooted than Hawkeye, but slow and meandering all the same. The bedroom door shut softly, and the house was plunged into sudden silence. The only noise was a faint hum from the refrigerator and a faint gurgling from the kitchen sink as it digested something stuck deep in its pipes. Leaning back in his chair, Potter pulled out a thin Zane Gray paperback from an inner coat pocket and thumbed through it to his old spot, marked with his airline ticket. Tom Daley and Patricia Carter would be fine companions until he was needed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tough conversation with Potter leads Hawkeye to an impasse. His friendship with BJ may be damaged by their sheer proximity to each other after years apart, but their shared struggles draw them together in a bond neither can forget. It’s up to Hawkeye to decide what’s best for them both and how they should proceed - together, or apart? And what future awaits them either way?

Just as Potter was fearing that he'd run out of book before he ran out of time, there was a muffled thump from somewhere down the hall. He left his book on the table, and guided by sound and guesswork, found his way to Hawkeye’s room. There was light coming from under the door, and as he placed his hand on the doorknob, he could hear Hawkeye swearing quietly to himself. 

Puzzled, he pushed open the door and found Hawkeye sitting on the bed, grimacing and rubbing one knee. “Everything okay in here?” he asked, giving the rest of the room a cautious look. 

“Everything except my knee,” said Hawkeye. He still looked somewhat dazed, but mercifully, he seemed completely aware of his surroundings. “That's the rudest awakening I've had since I woke up on the front walk during a thunderstorm.”

“Mind if I step in?” Hawkeye shrugged and gestured to an empty chair near the bed, which Potter took, watching the floor for pieces of glass as he went. 

“Well, how did BJ go down?” asked Hawkeye with a wry smile. “I heard him slam one of his dresser drawers, so he must've been mad. What were you two gabbing about?”

“Nothing that was intended to make him upset,” said Potter, purposefully vague, which Hawkeye picked up on and nodded in agreement. 

“Got it, I'll keep my nose to myself.” He hesitated, then added, “I am worried about him, though. I feel like there's a lot he's keeping from me.”

Taking a deep breath, Potter weighed his words carefully before responding. “Son, you know I don't like to interfere in matters that don't concern me,” he began, “But given the situation, I think I'll make an exception. I don't know how much he's told you -”

“He told me about what happened at the hospital, if that's what you mean,” Hawkeye interrupted. “And he’s been under a terrible amount of stress. I tried bringing it up today but he just shut down. If there’s more that you know, then…?” There was a hint of desperation in his voice that Potter took note of, an unspoken plea to know more of whatever BJ was hiding from him.

“He hasn’t been especially open with me, either,” said Potter, and Hawkeye grimaced. “Try not to get too frustrated; he seems to think that showing the strain means he’s letting his family down, and he includes you in that statement.”

Hawkeye stood and crossed to his suitcase, where his bathrobe lay splayed over the pile of dirty clothes spilling out of it. Pulling it on with quick, anxious movements, he tightened the cord and began to sort the clothes into piles, just to give his hands something to do. “I’m not frustrated,” he said, extricating his last clean shirt from the pile and flinging it across the room. “I’m concerned, and nervous as hell. He’s been going downhill fast this past week, and I’m pretty sure it’s my fault.”

“What makes you say that?”

There was a clatter as a previously undiscovered bottle went rolling to the floor, disturbed from its resting place by Hawkeye’s cleaning efforts. “Well, he does. He basically admitted to me that he feels like I'm a burden.”

“And were those his exact words?” asked Potter, frowning. 

“His exact words were, ‘I had to take care of you,’ and a few very pointed comments about the state of my mental health.” Hawkeye picked up the empty bottle, eyeing the last dregs of its contents, and sighed. “He may have a fair point.”

Potter rubbed his chin, frowning. “You may have had your fair share of bad days, but so did he. I wouldn't say that's a fair assessment.”

“BJ never - never mind, this isn't about me,” said Hawkeye, shaking his head. “It's about him, his family, his practice.”

“Now hold on, son,” said Potter, catching his eye with a stern look. “From what I hear, you’re not exactly on here on vacation. Don’t you think you’re entitled to a little consideration?”

“I don’t know. He’s the one that invited me, but I still feel guilty for accepting. If I’d just stayed home -”

“- He’d be in the exact same position that he is now, only without you for company,” Potter finished. “Quit blaming yourself for something neither of you can control. You’ll only end up driving yourself crazy.”

“But you can’t argue that my being here hasn’t made things worse,” said Hawkeye, scowling. “When I first got here he was the same old BJ, minus the fatigues and plus a new kid. In a little over a week we went from same old, same old, to screaming at each other in his kitchen. Forgive me, but I don’t see how that’s a coincidence.”

“You two had a fight?”

The memory of it, combined with past memories of their more serious spats, made him wince. “Based on what he said, he resents that he’s been forced into being my caretaker yet again. It’s putting a strain on him, Peg and the kids, too. And the longer I’ve been here, the worse it’s gotten.” 

“So, what do you want to do about this situation?”

There was a short silence as Hawkeye considered his decision. “I want to go back home,” he said finally, looking up. “Tomorrow, if I can.”

Potter nodded, his expression unchanged. “And you’re sure of that decision?”

“Yeah, actually. I feel almost relieved.”

“I'm glad to hear it; sometimes that's an indicator that you made a good choice.” He watched Hawkeye’s face carefully and added, “But, I'm guessing something about that decision still doesn't sit too well with you.”

Hawkeye shrugged, staring into the depths of his suitcase. Only a little over a week had gone by and still he had never completely unpacked. It was almost like he had known the visit wasn’t going to last long. “I - I don’t know. I’d feel like I was abandoning him. He told me he needed me.”

“Something tells me I’m not getting the whole picture here,” said Potter. “Care to give me a snapshot?”

“I can’t tell you what he won’t even tell me,” said Hawkeye, turning the bottle over in his hands. Finally he tossed it onto a pile of clothes and sat down on the bed again, looking up to give Potter a rueful look. “I don’t know what he wants. I don’t even know what he needs.”

Potter raised an eyebrow. “How about what you need?”

“How about that?” he said with a dry laugh.

“It’s a serious question, Hawkeye.”

“I know.” He shook his head, wondering when his gift of words had packed up and left without him. “I need an easy answer, but it doesn’t seem like there is one.”

“Well,” Potter said, rubbing his chin. “Just take things one step at a time.”

“Right. But what’s the next step?”

Potter nodded towards the door. “Talk to your friend. Let him know what your plans are, and go from there.” 

The imagined conversation to come didn’t give Hawkeye any confidence, but neither did it feel like a bad decision. “That’s a good next step,” he said, and gave Potter a grateful smile. “I can’t tell you how glad I am you showed up here. All the way from Missouri to California just to give us a fatherly talking-to.”

“Well, you seemed like you needed it,” Potter said with a grin. “And I’ve still got one more stop before I head home.”

“Radar,” Hawkeye realized, and his face fell. “You don’t think there’s something up with him, do you?”

Potter shook his head. “I’m sure the lad’s fine. I just want to check in with him to make sure. Besides, we have some catching up to do.”

“Would you mind if I came with?” he asked, looking at his suitcase. “If I pack tonight, I could go down to the airport with you tomorrow. I’d like to say goodbye to him before I go.”

Potter smiled. “Sounds like a fine idea.”

Imbued with a new sense of purpose, Hawkeye accompanied Potter to the door with a new energy in his step, feeling like he had a clear path in front of him for the first time in months. Going home wouldn’t be so bad. He knew people who could help him find work, and if all else failed, he could go to Boston again, pick up the practice, do what was necessary, even if what was necessary involved psychiatry. Just a step in the process. Life could get better depending on what he was willing to bear.

He waved Potter off at the front walk, confirming where they would meet the next day, and leaned back against the door, drinking in the night air. His decision felt strange to him when he considered it alone in the dark, riddled with potential flaws, but it still felt right. He still felt that peculiar feeling of relief when he imagined going home, even if it was to an empty house. But better an empty house than a house divided.

He felt BJ’s presence before a word was spoken, and turned with an almost guilty look. 

“Heading home?” BJ asked, the words heavy in the hushed air.

“Ranch homes aren’t known for their thick walls, I see,” said Hawkeye. It was too dark to make out BJ’s expression, and he regarded him nervously, wondering what would come next.

“Hawk, I’m sorry.” There was a pause as Hawkeye blinked and tried not to interrupt until BJ completed his thought. “This… everything that’s happened. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happened, to you, to me, to us. All I know is - is that -”

“Things are different,” he finished. BJ nodded in silent agreement. “It’s okay. I should have known when you didn’t write.”

“I’m sorry about that too. I know you’ve already had to go through that once, with Trapper. I never really meant to, I never consciously thought about it. Do you remember when that camera crew came to the camp and interviewed us?”

“Sure,” said Hawkeye, surprised at the sudden subject change. “It’s all anyone could talk about for weeks afterward.”

“The interviewer - hell if I can remember his name - he asked if I would want to see any of the people I worked with, after the war.” He laughed, short and dry. “I said I was torn between the love I have for you all, and wanting to erase every single memory I had of the place.”

“Ah.”

“I felt terrible for being so honest,” he continued, and although it was dark, Hawkeye knew he had on that rueful, almost sarcastic smile he wore so often. “I thought, God, I hope nobody here ever gets a copy of that tape. I’d hate for them to know. But I think they figured it out anyway.”

“Yeah.” Hawkeye hesitated for a moment before adding, “Nobody resents you for it, you know.”

BJ shook his head. “When I spoke with Potter on the phone the other morning, he said that I shouldn’t close you off. That it’s up to us to be there for each other, we’re all we have, and he’s right, I should be there for you, I should’ve -”

“No,” Hawkeye broke in, startling BJ into silence. “No, he’s wrong. We’re not all we have. You have your family, you have a wife who’s been there for you from the very beginning, you have people at work that care enough about you to make sure you get the time off you need.”

“But what about you?”

“I have my own supports,” said Hawkeye, and as he spoke, he found himself surprised by how simple it all was. “I get new letters almost every day; even Charles writes me once a month. I’ve got people back home I’ve known my whole life. I’m not alone, BJ.”

BJ sighed. “But you came to  _ me _ . And I let you down.”

“I did, but I wasn’t thinking straight.” Hawkeye let out his own sigh and shrugged. “I thought if I could just see you again, it would help center me - like being in the Swamp again, drinking martinis and griping about life. I didn’t stop to think about your life first, what you might be dealing with.”

“I’m sorry,” BJ said again. “I just - I can’t do both.”

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve got a lot on your plate, that’s nothing to apologize for.” 

BJ considered it for a long moment, then gave a slow nod. The conversation felt strangely final to them both. “Alright. What time are you leaving tomorrow?”

A heavy weight, which Hawkeye had not even realized was there, lifted off his chest. “After breakfast, maybe nine o’clock.”

“Need any help with packing?”

“I think I can manage.” Hawkeye looked out at the road, then back to his friend. “My address is still the same as it always was, if you feel like writing.”

“I think I can manage,” BJ said with a slight, sad smile.

Hawkeye responded in kind. “Alright then. Goodnight, Beej.”

“Night, Hawk.”

Hawkeye waited until he could hear the bedroom door close, then followed his friend back into the house. An empty suitcase waited for him, flanked by an empty bed, waiting to go home to an empty house. If he could get any sleep, he would need it for the following day. 


	7. Chapter 7

In Crabapple Cove, fall was in full swing. The air was full of tumbling leaves, the smell of malt from the brewery on the edge of town, and the honks of geese beginning their journey South. Half hidden behind dark green pines and orange maples, the Pierce home shone with a fresh coat of white paint. In the front yard, a salvaged rowboat was up on sawhorses, protected from the weather under a drop cloth and surrounded by various tools. 

Inside, with his feet up on the table and a glass of hard cider near to hand, Hawkeye sat reading his letters, passing the time before his date. 

Radar was writing to him from back home in Iowa, having made the trip only a short month after their last meeting in California. Life in the sunshine state hadn’t suited him, he said, and what was wrong with going out and making a life for yourself on your own, anyway? He was working at a drugstore only a mile away from his house, sure to make manager soon, and seeing a very nice girl who worked at the soda shop next door. Hawkeye smiled as he finished the last page; Radar’s letters had become increasingly happier since he got back home.

The monthly update from Charles included tidbits of his personal life; Honoria’s poetry getting published, the announcement of her first child, the news of which Charles spoke of with uncharacteristic giddiness. His own recent achievements in the medical world were mentioned as an afterthought, but with no small amount of pride.

From everyone else, the news was good but unremarkable; bits and pieces of day to day happenings, what a friend from work had said, a movie they had seen that he should really see as well. However, he had been saving one in particular for last; his first letter from BJ since he got home. 

Patience had never been his purview, but a strange combination of anticipation and anxiety had kept him from opening it until the very end. He tore it open and unfolded the single sheet of paper inside as carefully as he could.

_ Dear Hawk, _

_ I have to admit, it was hard to think of a single thing to write you about. Life here has been very quiet. I talked to our chief of surgery, Dr. Thur, and got transferred from the ICU back to general surgery, which has taken a lot of the stress out of my life. The kids are doing well in school, and Peg took a part-time job at the library to keep busy. I hope things are similarly quiet for you, and that life at home is treating you well. _

_ Your friend, _

_ BJ _

 

There were a few rubbed out pencil marks; the beginnings of another sentence, lost to uncertainty.  _ Oh well,  _ he thought.  _ It’ll take time.  _ They’d be back to their old selves in time, or at least back to their old level of familiarity. He could handle a few stilted conversations about the weather and home life if it meant there were any letters at all. 

In the meantime, there were other things to occupy him; his patient with the eczema problem, the broken shutter on the upstairs window, and a visit from a certain blonde, come all the way from an army base in Colorado to see him. Years of correspondence, and they were finally going to meet again.

Swinging his feet back onto the floor, he picked up pencil and paper, and after a moment of thought, began to write. 

_ Dear BJ, _

_ I’m happy to hear about your transfer to a quieter life; the ICU is a rough place, even compared to Korea. I’ve been more than happy to stick to dealing with the sniffles and boo-boos I get here. The most exciting thing that’s happened in a week was the neighbor kid, knocking on my door with a barely scraped knee, asking for a bandaid and a lollipop. The tears dried up the moment I regretfully informed him that I only had some old cough drops. _

 

He paused, chewing the end of his pencil. There was a moment of deliberation before he began to write again.

 

_ Life is treating me better than it used to. I went to see a doctor in Vermont by the name of Hendricks about my sleep problems, and I was then referred to a therapist a little closer to home. I wasn’t too excited about the whole ordeal, but it turns out he’s treated guys with my problem before. Usually they’re former soldiers, but I wasn’t the first doctor he’s seen. He prescribed me a heavier dose of imipramine to bed me down, and talk therapy to help keep me down. Turns out after a lifetime of being told I talk too much, talking is what I was supposed to be doing all along. Who would’ve guessed, right? You’ll be happy to know that I’m not taking anymore nighttime strolls, and there’s a bolt on the front door, just in case. _

_ Speaking of nighttime strolls, I’m due for one this very evening, hopefully hand in hand. We finally got all the details worked out last week, and I’ve been cleaning like crazy to get the house ready. You wouldn’t believe how much dust a ceiling fan can collect until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Would you believe I’m actually nervous? I guess you can, it’s been so long since I’ve seen - _

 

The rumbling of an engine broke his concentration, causing him to look up with an expectant expression, letter forgotten for the moment. A car honked outside, and he jumped up from the table, checking his reflection in the window above the kitchen sink. Through that window he could see her waiting for him, the blue wool of her coat catching the sun, a bright patch of sky in a sea of gold and crimson leaves. He grinned as he hurried to the door, pulling on his coat; this visit had been a long time coming.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, the final chapter! Thank you all so much for sticking with me through this story - it's been a long journey! I'm so thankful for all your kind words and reviews :)


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